"Problems  of 
The  J\(e)v  Qhristianity 


E.  M.  LAWRENCE  GOULD 


LIBRARY   OF   THE   THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 

PRINCETON.    N.  J. 

PRESENTED  BY 


Rev.  Lewis  Sasse 


BX  8721    .G7  1922 
Gould,   Edwin  Miner  Lawrence, 
1886- 

Problems  of  the  new 


PROBLEMS  OF 
THE  NEW  CHRISTIANITY 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2014 


https://archive.org/details/problemsofnewchrOOgoul_0 


'Problems  of 


E.  M.  LAWRENCE  GOULD 


EDITOR  OP  "  THE  NEW-CHURCH  MESSENGEB  " 
AUTHOR  OP  '•  SON  OF  GOD  AND  SON  OF  MAN  " 

WITH  INTRODUCTION 
BY 

JOHN  GODDARD 


THB  NEW-CHURCH  PRESS 
NEW  YORK 


BV 


COPYRIGHTED,  1922,  BY 
THE  NEW-CHURCH  BOARD  OF  PUBLICATION 

PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES 


To  a  Group 

MISUNDERSTOOD  AND  NOT  INFREQUENTLY  MALIGNED 
FOR  WHOM  I  HAVE  A  DEEP  AFFECHON 
AND  IN  WHOSE  FUTURE  I  HAVE  AN 
UNSHAKABLE  CONFIDENCE  — 

The  Tounger  Generation  of  Today 


FOREWORD 


The  following  pages  embody  in  outline  an 
answer  to  the  great  fundamental  questions  of 
religion  and  the  future  life.  They  were  pre- 
pared and  delivered  in  the  usual  course  of 
pulpit  ministration,  but  were  also  designed  to 
meet  a  broader  need  than  is  usually  felt  in 
our  churches.  Through  association  with  Mr. 
Gould  I  have  known  of  his  great  desire  to 
answer  the  questions  of  thinking  people, 
especially  of  young  men  as  yet  unsettled  in 
their  religious  convictions  —  to  appeal  not 
only  to  "the  man  in  the  street,"  or  to  men  as 
we  find  them,  but  to  all  honest  minds,  well 
disposed  toward,  unconvinced  by,  or  skeptical 
of  the  former  Christian  teachings  —  to  supply 
a  rational  basis  for  their  faith,  such  as  the 
New-Church  revelation  ofifers. 

This  is  a  task  great  enough  for  any  man. 
The  present  freedom  of  the  human  mind, 
vii 


FOREWORD 


absolved  so  largely  from  the  past  bondage  of 
fear  and  superstition,  together  with  the  grow- 
ing conviction  that  religion  is  character,  good 
living,  good  will,  opens  a  wide  door  of  oppor- 
tunity to  one  who  loves  and  who  is  fitted  for 
this  broader  work.  Mr.  Gould  seems  espe- 
cially adapted  for  it,  not  only  by  inchnation 
and  training,  by  clearness  of  thought  and 
diction,  but  also  by  the  fact  that,  during  the 
war  and  since  the  armistice,  he  has  been  closely 
associated  with  young  men  in  the  service.  The 
dangers  and  sufferings  of  the  soldiers  and 
sailors  who  took  an  active  part  in  the  war  tend 
to  bring  to  the  fore  these  great  questions  of 
life  and  death,  and  I  have  much  sympathy 
with  Mr.  Gould's  strong  desire  to  meet  such 
questions  with  that  form  of  truth  which  not 
only  satisfies  the  intellect,  but  appeals  also 
to  those  deepest  afi'ections  whose  germinal 
forms  have  been  implanted  in  the  earliest 
stages  of  life  by  the  angels  of  infancy  who 
"always  behold  the  face  of  my  Father." 
It  will  be  the  duty  of  the  New-Church 
viii 


FOREWORD 


teachers  of  the  next  generations,  while  not 
neglecting  the  needs  of  the  individual,  to  apply 
the  thought  of  the  perfect  love  of  God  as 
revealed  in  the  Person  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ 
to  the  practical  conditions  of  the  world  —  to 
supplement  the  words  of  the  prayer,  "Thy  will 
be  done,  as  in  heaven,  so  upon  the  earth," 
by  pointing  and  leading  the  way  to  its  ful- 
filment —  to  carry  this  missionary  message 
to  all  the  world.  And  to  this  work  we  hope 
and  believe  that  the  author  of  the  present 
volume  may  be  a  successful  and  an  honored 
contributor. 

John  Goddard 

Newtonville,  Mass. 
March  16,  1922 


ix 


I  Who  or  What  Is  God? 

II  Can  God  Speak  With  Men? 
m  Do  Men  Dm? 

IV  What  Is  the  Religious  Life? 


I 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 

In  the  beginning  God  created  the  heavens 
and  the  earth,    (Gen.  i,  i.) 

And  Jesus  came  and  spake  unto  them, 
saying,  All  power  is  given  unto  me  in 
heaven  and  on  earth.    (Matt,  xxviii,  i8) 

^HIS  is,  as  we  are  so   frequently  re- 


X  minded,  an  age  of  rapid  and  perva- 
sive change.  The  material  conditions,  and 
with  them  the  economic,  social,  intellectual, 
even  the  moral  structure  of  human  life  as 
it  has  long  been  known  are  in  a  state  of  most 
bewildering  flux.  Nothing  seems  altogether 
fixed  or  stable.  In  the  world  of  ideas,  hardly 
a  principle  that  has  for  generations  been  re- 
garded as  established  but  has  had  to  meet 
with  criticism,  if  it  has  not  actually  been 
denied. 


I 


WHO-OR  WHAT-IS  GOD? 


Humanly  speaking,  that  which  lies  be- 
hind this  "great  unrest"  is  the  world  spread 
of  the  spirit  of  democracy.  From  the  be- 
ginning of  history  until  almost  within  our 
recollection,  the  main  factor  in  most  people's 
lives  was  one  kind  or  another  of  authority. 
It  was  the  habit  of  the  average  man  in  the 
average  situation  to  do  as  he  was  told.  Nor 
did  this  seem  at  all  strange  to  him,  since  his 
associates  and  his  forbears,  in  their  turn, 
had  quite  unquestioningly  done  likewise. 
It  was  not  just  a  matter  of  action,  either; 
it  was  just  as  true  of  thought.  For  genera- 
tion after  generation  men  were  told  by 
those  who  happened  to  be  in  authority 
not  only  what  they  should  do,  but  what  they 
should  believe.  They  believed  —  as  they 
acted  —  blindly. 

If  the  established  authorities  of  church 
and  state  had  been  willing  to  keep  within 
the  bounds  of  reason,  this  state  of  affairs 
might  have  kept  on  indefinitely,  and  we 

2 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


might  today  be  living  in  a  continuation  of 
the  Dark  Ages.  But  —  fortunately,  as  it 
turned  out  —  they  were  not.  First  in  the 
church,  the  intellectual  honesty  of  men  like 
Martin  Luther  and  his  fellow  reformers  was 
forced  into  reluctant  rebellion,  and  political 
rebellion  followed  after.  Slowly,  but  gather- 
ing strength  like  wildfire,  the  spirit  of  indi- 
vidualism swept  over  western  Europe  till  it 
caught  even  in  the  remote  American  colo- 
nies. And  here  first  in  modern  times  there 
was  set  up  a  nation  consciously  committed 
to  the  principle  that  authority  rests  not  upon 
Divine  right  but  upon  the  consent  of  the 
governed.  So  contagious  was  the  American 
example  that  it  has  changed  the  whole  social 
and  political  face  of  the  world ;  so  that  today 
men  everywhere  demand  the  right  to  govern 
themselves  and  to  think  for  themselves.  The 
days  of  authority  and  obedience  are  forever 
ended. 

This  tremendous  change  has  made  or  will 
3 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 

ultimately  make  it  necessary  for  human 
life  to  be  recast  from  top  to  bottom.  Noth- 
ing can  remain  quite  as  it  was,  for  every- 
thing must  be  re-established  upon  the  nev" 
foundation  of  democracy.  This  does  not 
mean  that  all  that  was  worth  while  in  th- 
old  ways  of  living  will  be  lost.  Indeed,  all 
that  was  really  good  will  finally  be  kept, 
or  be  returned  to.  But  the  good  old  things 
will  be  retained  for  a  new  reason.  In  a 
good  many  ways  we  shall  still  follow  tradi- 
tion, but  no  longer  simply  because  it  is 
tradition;  it  will  be  because  it  seems  to 
men's  impartial,  reasonable  judgment  to  be 
worth  the  following.  And  this  will  be  as 
true  in  religious  matters  as  in  any  others. 
Our  religious  conceptions  must,  like  all  the 
rest,  be  re-examined,  re-tested,  re-valued 
and  in  many  instances  re-stated  so  as  to  meet 
the  needs  of  a  new  age.  I  earnestly  believe 
that,  whatever  else  may  be  abandoned,  the 
world  will  and  must  retain  Christianity,  but 
4 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


it  will  not  be  the  Christianity  of  the  autocra- 
tic ages.  That  which  must  come  —  and  is, 
indeed,  already  coming  —  is  a  new  Chris- 
tianity, deeper,  fuller,  richer,  truer  and  more 
reasonable  than  the  faith  of  any  previous 
generation. 

Such  a  Christianity,  I  say,  is  even  now  in 
process  of  development.  It  is  not  limited 
by  the  bounds  of  organization,  but  is  found 
in  men  of  all  denominations  and  of  none. 
It  is  affecting  all  denominations;  for  where 
is  the  church  which  will  today  accept,  with- 
out reinterpretation,  the  creeds  and  dogmas 
even  of  a  generation  ago?  Yet  the  estab- 
lishment of  the  new  Christianity  is  no  easy 
task,  as  every  forward  looking  minister  or 
church  worker  knows.  A  rational  examina- 
tion of  the  fundamentals  of  religion  raises 
problems  which  cannot  be  solved  without 
the  most  earnest  effort  and  the  utmost  open- 
mindedness.  It  is  my  effort  in  what  foUows 
to  do  what  I  can  toward  carrying  on  this 
5 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


work,  and  my  awareness  of  my  personal 
inadequacy  finds  its  compensation  in  the 
fact  that  the  ideas  which  I  shall  try  to  ex- 
press are  not  my  own,  but  came  from  one 
who  has  been  called  "the  greatest  mind 
since  Aristotle,"  the  great  Swedish  scien- 
tist, philosopher  and  theologian,  Emanuel 
Swedenborg.  In  the  light  of  his  teaching 
—  or,  as  I  believe,  of  God's  own  teaching 
through  him  —  I  shall  approach  the  prob- 
lems which  are  to  be  considered  in  this 
little  book. 

What  is  the  first  and  greatest  problem 
which  the  new  Christianity  must  face,  and 
to  which  it  must  somehow  find  an  answer 
suited  to  the  present  age?  Since  the  chief 
aim  of  all  religion  is  to  set  up  a  right  relation 
between  men  and  God,  the  problem  is  in- 
evitably that  of  God  Himself.  Until  the 
churches  have  at  least  substantially  agreed 
as  to  the  nature  of  God,  who  is  at  once  the 
subject  and  the  avowed  source  of  their 
6 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


message,  there  can  never  be  a  real  growth  of 
religion  or  a  general  acceptance  of  it  by  the 
world.  God,  the  Creator  of  the  universe, 
whose  laws  are  its  laws  and  by  whose  life 
it  lives  —  is  He  in  any  sense  a  person,  so 
that  we  can  say,  "Who  is  He?"  or  was 
creation  but  the  work  of  an  unknown,  im- 
personal First  Cause  or  Creative  Energy? 
Who  —  or  what  —  is  God? 

There  is,  of  course,  the  prior  question 
whether  there  is  any  God  at  all,  but  that  is 
one  on  which  we  need  not  spend  much  time. 
On  those  who  can  be  satisfied  to  explain 
the  universe  by  saying  that  it  "happened" 
or  "evolved,"  an  argument  is  generally 
wasted.  If  we  exclude  all  but  the  evidence 
of  sense,  then  certainly  the  fact  of  God  can- 
not be  proved.  But  if  the  evidence  of  reason 
is  considered,  then  it  must  be  evident  at  least 
that  all  this  something  did  not  come  from 
nothing,  for  "from  nothing,  nothing  comes." 
No  one  has  ever  yet  seen  an  effect  without 
7 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


a  cause,  which  was  in  turn  the  effect  of  some 
preceding  cause.  So  a  First  Cause  has  been 
and  is  the  postulate  of  all  reasonable  think- 
ing about  the  phenomena  of  existence. 

There  is  one  other  simple,  rational  prin- 
ciple which  is  fundamental  to  our  thinking! 
If  "from  nothing,  nothing  comes,"  it  must 
be  likewise  true  that  the  less  cannot  cause 
or  generate  the  greater.  Where,  if  not  from 
nothing,  could  the  added  greatness  come 
from?  Therefore  we  must  assume  that 
everything  in  the  wide  range  of  human  ex- 
perience has  or  has  had  a  cause  as  great  as 
if  not  greater  than  itself;  and  that  the  First 
Cause  is  as  great  as,  if  not  greater  than  the 
sum  of  all  that  has  been,  is,  or  can  be.  And, 
since  there  is  no  known  limit  to  what  can  be, 
therefore  the  First  Cause  is  itself  without 
limit,  or  infinite.  Thus  the  first  rational 
conclusion  from  a  study  of  the  universe  is 
that  there  must  be  an  infinite  First  Cause. 

Since  the  less  cannot  create  the  greater, 
8 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


the  First  Cause  —  or  God  —  must  be  at  least 
equal  to  the  highest  known  form  of  existence. 
The  highest  form  of  material  existence  is 
the  rather  mysterious  thing  we  know  as 
force  or  energy.  This,  indeed,  not  only 
underhes  but  constitutes  all  matter,  for  if 
matter  is  analysed  it  breaks  up  into  elemental 
atoms,  which  in  turn  resolve  themselves  into 
electrons.  And  these,  scientists  define  as 
"points  of  force."  There  is,  however,  a 
form  of  existence  which  is  higher  than 
material  energy  —  which  can  modify,  con- 
trol and  direct  energy  to  its  own  purposes. 
This  higher  power  is  the  soul  or  personality  of 
man,  operating  through  the  activity  of  his  will 
and  intelligence.  The  soul  is  at  least  in 
part  superior  to  any  power  outside  itself. 
Nothing  controls  it  that  is  not  even  more 
controlled  by  it.  Therefore  we  may  say  that 
soul,  or  personality,  is  the  highest  known  or 
conceivable  form  of  being. 

This  being  the  case,  and  since  (once  more) 

9 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


the  less  cannot  create  the  greater,  it  must 
follow  that  the  Creator  of  personality  must 
himself  possess  it  —  that  God  must  be,  in 
some  sense  at  least,  a  Person.  Is  it  con- 
ceivable, really,  that  an  unconscious  force 
could  create  the  conscious  soul  of  man? 
God  is  a  Person,  and  possessed  of  the  essen- 
tial attributes  of  personality,  active  will  and 
active  intelligence.  Or  you  may  say  that 
He  consists  in  will  and  intelligence  united 
in  activity.  Thus  His  essential  nature  is 
threefold,  which  led  the  wise  men  of  old 
time  to  speak  of  Him  as  a  Trinity;  yet  He 
is  not  a  trinity  of  persons  but  a  Trinity  in 
a  Person. 

The  next  question  must  be  that  of  the 
moral  character  of  God's  will  and  intelli- 
gence. Here  the  answer  lies  in  the  simple 
fact  that  the  moral  sense  exists  in  man,  a 
being  whom  He  created.  If  man  is  or  can  be 
good,  then  God  must  be  infinitely  good.  If 
man's  thoughts  can  be  true,  God's  must  be 

lO 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


infinitely  so.  I  shall  assume  the  agreement 
of  most  thinking  people  at  the  present  time 
to  the  proposition  that  the  essence  of  moral 
goodness  is  unselfish  love.  Therefore  we  may 
describe  the  will  of  God  as  Infinite  Love 
and  His  Intelligence  as  Infinite  Wisdom. 
These  two,  with  their  unceasing  joint  acti- 
vity for  the  ultimate  well-being  of  all  created 
things,  make  up  the  true  and  infinite  Trinity 
—  Love,  the  Father;  Wisdom,  born  of  Love, 
the  Son;  and  the  activity  of  both  together 
the  Holy  Spirit. 

Now  the  conception  of  an  all-powerful, 
infinitely  wise  and  loving  God  must  face 
one  really  serious  objection  —  the  fact  of 
the  existence  in  the  universe  of  moral  evil. 
I  say  "moral  evil,"  though  in  point  of  fact 
there  is  no  other.  Evil  is  not  a  physical  but 
a  moral  quality,  and  cannot  properly  be 
predicated  of  material  things.  Material  na- 
ture has  no  quality  of  good  or  evil ;  it  is  no 
more  "cruel"  (as  men  sometimes  call  it) 
II 


WHO  —  OR  WHAT  —  IS  GOD  ? 

than  it  is  kind.  Its  forces  all  exist  for  useful 
ends,  and  all  are  useful  when  they  are  not 
misapplied.  But  in  the  spirit  of  man  the 
quality  of  moral  evil  does  exist,  and  has  ex- 
pressed itself  from  the  beginning  in  innumer- 
able ways;  and  there  are  many  thoughtful 
people  to  whom  this  fact  seems  to  cast  a  doubt 
on  the  existence  of  the  kind  of  God  Chris- 
tianity has  taught  us  to  believe  in.  I  will 
say  even  that  the  problem  of  evil  is  incom- 
parably the  most  difficult  that  religion  has 
to  face.  The  most  satisfactory  answer  to 
it  that  I  know  is  given  by  Swedenborg  in 
his  book  on  "The  Divine  Providence,"  and 
I  can  only  try  to  give  you  a  brief  outline  of 
its  teaching. 

In  the  first  place,  while  evil  has  a  very 
real  existence,  practically  speaking,  it  exists 
in  quite  a  different  sense  from  goodness. 
For,  like  all  negations,  it  exists  only  relatively 
to  the  thing  which  it  denies.  Evil  is  not  a 
thing  in  itself;  it  is  either  the  absence  or 

12 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


the  perversion  of  goodness.  In  the  former 
case,  it  is  exactly  parallel  with  physical  cold. 
Experimentally  and  to  sensation,  cold  exists, 
but  it  is  not  a  thing,  as  heat  is ;  it  is  simply 
absence  of  heat.  When  an  object  has  less 
heat  than  its  surroundings,  or  than  our 
bodies,  then  we  call  it  cold.  But  we  do  not 
say,  because  there  are  some  objects  that 
are  relatively  cold,  that  heat  does  not  exist  or 
is  a  failure.  Neither  does  the  fact  that  there 
are  people  who  are  relatively  evil  prove 
that  goodness  is  a  failure.  It  means  simply 
that  the  work  of  goodness  has  not  yet  been 
finished.  It  cannot  be  finished  in  the  nature 
of  things  so  long  as  new  people  are  contin- 
ually coming  into  being;  for  they  must  first 
be  created  before  the  operation  of  God's  love 
can  make  them  good. 

Man  cannot  be  and  could  not  possibly 
have  been  created  good.    He  could,  if  it 
had  been  worth  while,  have  been  made  a 
wonderful    automaton    which    would  go 
13 


WHO  —  OR  WHAT  —  IS  GOD  ? 

through  the  motions  of  goodness;  but  in 
that  case  his  acts  would  have  been  quite  de- 
void of  moral  quality.  Goodness  by  its 
very  nature  has  the  implication  of  a  choice, 
of  a  free  choice.  A  good  man  is  good  because 
he  did  not  have  to  be  good  but  desired  to  be 
so.  So  the  very  existence  of  real  goodness 
demands  the  existence  of  at  least  a  possibil- 
ity of  refusing  it — a  possibiHty,  that  is,  of 
evil.  God  could  not  make  men  able  to  be 
good,  did  He  not  also  make  them  able  to  be 
bad. 

Man,  moreover,  in  the  exercise  of  freedom, 
has  the  power  not  only  to  refuse  goodness 
but  to  use  what  is  properly  and  in  intention 
good  for  evil  ends.  Nothing  exists  in  the 
material  universe  or  in  human  nature  which 
was  not  meant  to  serve  some  useful  purpose. 
Thus  the  instinct  of  self-preservation  is  a 
necessary  faculty  that  men  may  continue 
to  live;  but,  turned  to  selfishness,  it  be- 
comes the  root  of  every  evil.  Thus  again  the 
14 


WHO  —  OR  WHAT  —  IS  GOD  ? 


physical  and  spiritual  need  of  man  for  woman 
and  of  woman  for  man  was  meant  to  be  the 
basis  of  the  greatest  happiness  the  human 
race  can  know;  yet  has  been  made  a  source 
of  horror  and  disease.  It  is  no  fault  of  God's 
that  this  is  so.  From  Him  comes  never  any- 
thing but  goodness,  which  men  in  their 
selfishness  pervert  and  desecrate.  Man  alone 
is  to  blame  for  all  the  moral  evil  in  the 
universe. 

Some  may  still  ask,  "Why  could  not  God 
have  made  men  different?"  Because  to  have 
made  them  different  would  have  robbed 
them  of  the  one  gift  which  is  higher  than 
goodness,  since  it  is  the  basis  not  alone  of 
goodness  but  of  manhood,  individuality. 
That  is  freedom,  which  is  God's  supreme 
gift  to  men  and  angels  —  freedom  to  be  as 
good  and  wise  as  they  desire  and  to  grow 
more  so  to  eternity,  or  to  refuse  all  goodness 
and  all  wisdom.  Freedom  not  only  is  God's 
supreme  gift  to  men,  but  is  the  one  thing 
IS 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


which,  in  all  His  infinite  relationships,  He 
guards  most  closely.  That  is  the  reason  why 
God  cannot  intervene  to  stop  the  evils  an^ 
abuses  of  this  world.  That  is  the  reason  why 
He  did  not  stop  the  War.  If  men  are  to  be 
men  and  not  automata,  they  must  be  left, 
both  individually  and  collectively,  to  make 
themselves  the  kind  of  world  that  they  de- 
sire. If,  in  their  madness,  they  desire  to 
make  themselves  a  little  hell,  God  can  do 
nothing  more  than  love  and  pity  them.  In 
this  sense  Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  is  right  in  saying 
that  God  is  not  omnipotent.  He  has  set  up 
a  universe  in  which  all  the  natural  and  moral 
forces  work  for  righteousness;  He  stands 
ready  at  every  moment  to  throw  the  whole 
force  of  His  being  into  every  struggle  for  the 
right;  but  He  can  never  and  will  never  take 
away  the  freedom  He  has  given  us. 

There  are  few  words,  indeed,  which  have 
been  more  misunderstood  than  has  "omnip- 
otence."   It  has  for  centuries  been  taken 
i6 


WHO  —  OR  WHAT  —  IS  GOD  ? 


to  imply  the  power  to  do  what  is  essentially 
impossible.  Thus  the  medieval  schoolmen 
wrangled  over  God's  ability  to  make  a 
yardstick  with  one  end.  But  the  ability 
to  create  a  contradiction  is  no  true  sign  of 
omnipotence.  Power  thus  applied  would 
simply  destroy  itself.  For  God  to  attempt, 
for  instance,  to  make  a  man  free  and  not 
free  would  be  to  take  away  all  meaning  from 
the  word  "freedom,"  and  all  reason  and 
sanity  from  the  universe.  God  cannot  act 
in  a  way  contrary  to  "the  nature  of  things" 
because  the  nature  of  things  is  fundamentally 
His  own  nature.  His  omnipotence  consists 
in  His  unlimited  ability  to  work  wisely  for 
the  fulfilment  of  His  own  good  purposes. 
It  is  not  an  independent  attribute,  but  a 
quality  of  the  Divine  Love  and  the  Divine 
Wisdom. 

But  the  most  important  phase  of  our 
great  subject  is  still  to  be  dealt  with.  What 
we  have  so  far  said  of  God  has  been  in  ab- 
17 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


stract  terms.  We  have  talked  of  His  love 
and  wisdom,  of  His  power,  and  so  on.  At 
the  same  time  we  first  of  all  described  Him 
as  a  Person.  Can  we,  so  to  speak,  know  Him 
personally?  Is  there  a  real  and  individual 
relation  with  Him  into  which,  in  some  way, 
we  can  enter?  If  there  is  not,  a  mere  theo- 
retical understanding  of  Him  is  of  little 
value,  and  theology  becomes  a  science  just 
about  as  abstract  as  astronomy. 

God  as  Infinite  Love  and  Wisdom  is,  by 
His  very  nature,  absolutely  and  forever 
beyond  our  reach.  Infinity,  even  in  its 
lowest,  mathematical  sense,  is  something 
which  the  finite  mind  can  talk  about,  can 
postulate,  but  which  never  can  have  a  real 
and  concrete  meaning  to  it.  This  was  what 
the  apostle  meant  who  said,  "No  man  hath 
seen  God  at  any  time."  But  he  said  also, 
"The  only  begotten  Son,  which  is  in  the 
bosom  of  the  Father,  he  hath  brought  him 
forth  to  view."  God  as  He  is  in  Himself 
i8 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


could  never  really  have  been  known  to  us; 
but  for  that  very  reason  He  has  manifested 
Himself  to  us  in  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ. 
Here  is  the  very  centre  and  core  of  the  New 
Christianity  —  the  acknowledgment  that 
in  Jesus  all  God's  infinite  love  and  wisdom 
were  forever  made  accessible  to  all  mankind. 
If  we  desire  to  know  what  sort  of  person 
God  is,  we  may  find  our  answer  in  the  life 
and  personality  of  Christ.  As  Paul  said, 
"God  was  in  Christ,  reconciling  the  world 
unto  himself." 

Now  I  admit  that  the  fact  that  God  was 
in  Christ,  or  that  Christ  was  God,  cannot 
be  proved  by  ordinary  scientific  reasoning. 
It  is  not  the  sort  of  thing  that  could  be 
proved  in  any  case.  Who  can  prove,  for  ex- 
ample, that  the  symphonies  of  Beethoven  are 
beautiful?  One  must  first  feel  their  beauty, 
and  may  then,  if  he  wishes,  analyse  the  rea- 
sons for  it — may,  by  studying  the  laws  of 
harmony  and  counterpoint,  come  to  an  un- 
19 


WHO  —  OR  WHAT  —  IS  GOD  ? 

derstanding  of  the  way  in  which  the  beauty 
was  achieved.  It  is  so  with  the  deity  of 
Jesus  Christ.  One  must  first  feel  it  —  as 
good  men  and  women  have  so  powerfully 
felt  it  from  the  time  He  walked  on  earth  — 
and  may  then  try  to  analyse  or  to  account 
for  it  as  best  he  can.  Only,  let  us  not  lose 
our  sense  of  the  great  fact  because  the  ex- 
planation of  it  sometimes  seems  to  be  beyond 
our  powers. 

There  are  so  many  Christians  at  the  present 
day  whose  mental  attitude  might  be  ex- 
pressed as:  "Christ  must  somehow  have 
been  divine;  and  yet,  how  could  He  be?" 
Happily  for  the  world's  future,  this  is  not 
as  nearly  an  unanswerable  question  as  it 
first  appears.  The  answer  to  it,  may,  indeed, 
be  found  in  Christ's  own  words,  if  we  will 
study  them  intelligently.  We  know  that 
He  called  Himself  "the  Son  of  God,"  and 
also  "the  Son  of  Man."  He  spoke  of  God 
sometimes  as  one  afar  off  who  could  "for- 

20 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


sake"  Him,  and  at  other  times  as  His  own 
inner  nature.  ("I  and  the  Father  are  one.") 
Nor  did  He  mean  by  this  to  imply  simply 
the  sort  of  union  with  Divinity  which  any 
human  being  might  achieve.  He  quite  def- 
initely set  Himself  apart  from  other  men, 
calling  Himself  their  "Lord  and  Master."^ 
What  He  meant  was  that  in  this  world 
He  had  a  dual  nature,  of  which  one  part  was 
Divine  and  an  inheritance  from  God  Himself, 
the  other  human  and  inherited  from  Mary. 
All  His  life  on  earth  was  in  fact  one  long 
struggle  between  these  two  natures,  in  which 
the  Divine  eventually  won  a  complete  vic- 
tory. But  in  this  struggle  God  the  Creator 
met,  as  He  could  not  have  met  in  any  other 
way,  the  life  conditions  of  His  creatures, 
and  through  it  He  could  make  known  to 
them  forever  how  His  purpose  was  that  hu- 
man life  be  lived.    His  purpose  was  that 

>For  a  fuller  treatment  of  this  subject,  see  the  author's 
pamphlet,  "Son  of  God  and  Son  of  Man." 

21 


WHO  — OR  WHAT  — IS  GOD? 


"Word"  which  "was  in  the  beginning"; 
its  embodiment  in  Jesus  was  "the  Word 
made  flesh."  Jesus  was  thus  the  character 
of  God  Almighty,  stated  in  human  terms. 
He  was,  as  someone  lately  has  so  beautifully 
called  Him,  "all  of  God  that  we  can  ever 
know." 

"In  Him,"  as  Paul  said  again,  "dwelleth 
all  the  fulness  of  the  Godhead,  bodily." 
All  that  our  highest  intuitions  recognize  at 
once  as  Godlike,  all  that  our  reason  teaches 
us  to  look  for  in  the  Source  of  every  good, 
we  find  in  Jesus,  and  in  Him  alone  of  all  who 
ever  trod  the  earth.  God's  love  inspired 
Him;  God's  truth  spoke  through  His  lips; 
God's  power  operates  on  men  through  the 
unending,  ever-growing  influence  of  His  Di- 
vine Personality.  In  Him,  as  He  Himself 
said,  we  may  see  God,  and  through  Him 
come  in  touch  with  God.  For  the  Chris- 
tianity which  will  endure  all  earthly  changes, 
Jesus  Christ  and  He  alone  must  be  the 

22 


WHO  —  OR  WHAT  —  IS  GOD  ? 


source  of  all  inspiration,  the  recipient  of 
every  word  of  prayer  and  praise,  the  one 
final  example  of  each  would-be  Chris- 
tian's daily  living.  The  new  Christianity  can 
be  summed  up  in  a  single  word,  and  that  is, 
Christ! 


23 


n 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 

And  God  spake  all  these  words,  say- 
ing ....  (Ex.  XX,  I.) 

The  words  that  I  speak  unto  you,  they 
are  spirit,  and  they  are  life.  (John 
vi,  63.) 

THE  concept  of  a  literal,  verbal  revela- 
tion of  Divine  Truth  to  mankind  has 
been  fundamental  to  Christian  thinking,  in 
the  Protestant  Church  especially,  until  com- 
paratively recent  times.  During  the  whole 
of  what  we  spoke  of  as  the  period  of  author- 
ity, the  Holy  Bible  was  regarded  as  directly 
inspired  by  God  and  as,  in  consequence,  in- 
fallible. Any  belief  or  dogma  that  could 
plausibly  be  based  upon  a  text  of  Scripture 
was  thereby  regarded  as  not  only  beyond 
question  but  even  beyond  rational  examina- 
tion. Truth  was,  in  fact,  conceived  as  some- 
24 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


thing  higher  than  reason  and  not  necessarily 
accessible  to  it,  while  Divine  Authority  was 
the  one  and  proper  basis  of  belief. 

But,  with  the  recent  downfall  of  the  idea  of 
authority  in  political  and  social  matters,  there 
has  come  also  a  decided  weakening  in  ad- 
herence to  Divine  Authority,  in  this  sense 
at  least.  Men  have,  for  one  thing,  come  to 
to  see  quite  clearly  that  no  "act  of  faith"  can 
make  a  person  really  believe  what  he  does 
not  understand.  The  idea  that  it  could  is, 
indeed,  patently  absurd.  A  child,  for  in- 
stance, could  quite  easily  be  made  to  say, 
upon  parental  authority,  that  he  believed 
in  the  binomial  theorem,  but  unless  he  had 
studied  algebra  his  belief  would  have  no 
no  real  significance.  Just  so,  it  is  now  real- 
ized, one  might  say  that  he  believed  in  the 
vicarious  atonement;  but  the  practical  value 
of  his  belief  would  depend  absolutely  on  the 
degree  to  which  that  doctrine  held  a  defi- 
nite meaning  in  his  mind.  It  is  true  that 
25 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


in  either  case  one  might  say,  "  So  and  so,  who 
is  a  wiser  man  than  I,  says  that  this  is  true, 
so  I  will  assume  it  is  true  until  I  know  the 
contrary."  That  may  be  a  useful  attitude 
in  certain  instances,  but  it  is  not  belief. 
BeUef  does  not  rest  on  authority,  even 
Divine  Authority,  but  on  the  individual 
mind's  ability  to  understand  the  truth  and 
recognize  it  as  such. 

Seeing  this,  men  have  made  in  the  last 
few  years  an  earnest  effort  to  understand 
the  Bible,  and  that  very  effort  has  had  the 
effect  of  lessening  belief  in  the  Book's  lit- 
eral infallibility.  No  honest  and  impartial 
reader  can  deny  that  it  is  full  of  inaccura- 
cies and  contradictions;  and  its  apparent 
moral  standard,  even,  is  not  always  up  to 
present  day  requirements.  Furthermore,  we 
have  no  recent,  scientifically  accredited  in- 
stance of  God's  speaking  with  men  in  such  a 
way  as  the  "inspiration"  of  the  Bible  was 
once  thought  to  imply,  and  the  whole  con- 
26 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


cept  of  the  "miraculous"  has  been  pretty 
well  eliminated  from  modern  thinking.  How, 
it  is  said,  can  God,  who  is  the  source  of  law, 
be  thought  of  as  occasionally  violating  the 
very  laws  which  He  Himself  has  made? 
So,  while  most  Christians  still  assert  that 
they  believe  in  "the  inspiration  of  the  Bible," 
what  they  have  in  mind  is  not  the  old  idea 
of  actual  Divine  Revelation,  but  a  Divine 
enlightenment  of  the  Bible  writers  differing 
in  degree  but  not  in  kind  from  that  of  any 
earnest,  spiritually  minded  man. 

Is  this  to  be  the  final  verdict  in  the  matter? 
Certainly  it  does  not  harmonize  with  what 
the  Bible  claims  about  itself.  For  while  the 
Bible  nowhere  claims  a  literal  infallibility, 
it  does  claim,  in  many  places,  to  contain 
the  literal  words  of  the  Almighty.  "God 
spake  all  these  words,  saying.  .  .  ."  "The 
word  of  the  Lord  came  unto  me,  saying  ..." 
These  are  not  isolated  statements,  but  occur 
repeatedly.    Are  we  to  regard  them  simply 

27 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


as  the  unconscious  over-statement  of  a  super- 
stitious enthusiast,  who  puts  the  substance 
of  his  dreams  or  of  his  intuitions  into  the 
mouth  of  God;  or  have  they  such  a  rea- 
sonable basis  in  fact  that  we  may  still  accept 
them  literally?    Can  God  speak  with  men? 

In  the  last  chapter  we  spoke  of  God  as 
omnipotent,  but  saw  that  His  omnipotence 
does  not  involve  the  ability  to  act  un- 
reasonably or  in  violation  of  His  own  laws. 
We  should  say,  therefore,  that  God  cer- 
tainly can  speak  with  men,  provided,  first, 
that  there  is  a  good  and  sufiicient  reason 
for  His  doing  so,  and  second,  that  it  can  be 
done  without  the  violation  of  natural  or 
spiritual  law.  If  we  can  find  that  these 
two  conditions  exist,  or  have  existed,  then 
the  existence  of  concrete  Divine  Revelation 
ceases  to  be  either  impossible  or  unreason- 
able. 

Why,  then,  should  God  desire  to  speak 
with  men?  As  a  rule,  we  know  it  seems  to  be 
28 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


His  policy  not  only  to  leave  men  in  freedom 
but  to  do  nothing  for  them  that  they  can  do 
for  themselves.  Thus  the  human  infant, 
with  its  infinite  capacity  for  learning, 
comes  into  the  world  with  less  inborn, 
instinctive  knowledge  than  is  possessed  by 
any  other  living  creature.  Thus,  again, 
God  never  has  revealed  to  us  any  of  the  facts 
of  natural  science.  He  never  told  us  that  the 
earth  was  round,  or  that  steam  and  elec- 
tricity might  be  used  for  power.  But  if, 
on  the  other  hand,  there  are  facts  which  no 
human  study  or  ingenuity  ever  could  find 
out,  and  if,  moreover,  these  are  facts  which 
it  is  vitally  important  that  we  should  know, 
would  there  not  be  a  valid  reason  why  He 
should  reveal  these  facts  to  us?  This,  I 
confidently  believe,  is  just  the  case. 

Take,  as  a  supreme  instance,  the  great 
fact  of  God's  own  existence.    One  of  the 
strongest  and  most  valid  proofs  of  God's 
existence,  so  the  philosophers  tell  us,  is  the 
29 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


fact  that  the  idea  of  God  exists  in  the  human 
mind.  For,  they  assert,  the  mind  of  man 
is  not  so  constituted  as  to  be  able  to  origi- 
nate ideas  entirely  foreign  to  its  own  ex- 
perience. In  the  strict  sense,  indeed,  the 
mind  of  man  cannot  originate  anything. 
It  can  only  develope  and  expand  such  ideas 
as  come  to  it  from  the  outside.  If,  therefore, 
the  idea  of  God  exists,  it  must  be  that  it  has 
a  basis  in  reality,  and,  indeed,  in  actual  ex- 
perience. 

True  enough;  but  in  what  kind  of  expe- 
rience? Nothing  in  our  ordinary  lives  from 
day  to  day  would  lead  us,  in  and  of  itself, 
to  a  belief  in  God.  He  is  not  evident  to 
any  of  our  senses,  and,  if  He  is  the  spirit- 
ual Being  we  conceive  Him,  never  can  be. 
It  has  been  suggested  that  the  idea  of  God 
originated  in  man's  wonder  at  great  nat- 
ural phenomena,  such  as  thunder,  wind,  and 
so  on,  but  this  gives  our  primitive  ancestors 
credit  for  tremendous  powers  of  construc- 

30 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  RIEN  ? 


tive,  abstract  thinking.  Is  it  not,  really, 
far  more  reasonable  to  suppose  that  the 
idea  of  God  exists  in  the  mind  of  man  be- 
cause God  Himself  put  it  there,  and  put  it 
there  by  definite,  concrete  revelation  of 
Himself?  It  never  can  be  proved,  at  any  rate, 
and  I  for  one  do  not  believe,  that  there  is 
anything  in  nature  to  lead  man  to  imagine 
the  existence  of  the  supernatural. 

Does  it  not,  therefore,  seem  to  be  a  prob- 
ability that  God  always  has  revealed  Him- 
self to  man,  from  the  beginning?  As  to  His 
methods  in  the  times  we  know  as  prehistoric, 
we  have  little  basis  for  assertion.  It  is  inter- 
esting, however,  to  compare  Swedenborg's 
statement  that  there  was  once  an  "Ancient 
Word"  which  was  spread  over  a  large  part 
of  the  world  with  what  ethnologists  have 
since  discovered  as  to  the  similarities  in  the 
mythology  of  races  half  a  world  apart  and 
having  no  historical  connection  with  one 
another. 

31 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 

"But,"  you  may  say,  "even  though  God 
had  a  good  reason  for  revealing  Himself  to 
men,  would  not  His  doing  so  have  involved 
a  violation  of  the  laws  of  ordinary  human 
experience?  It  would  at  least  have  had  to 
be  a  supernatural  affair,  and  there  is  no 
scientific  evidence  of  the  existence  of  the 
supernatural."  Here  one  must  simply  ask 
the  question,  "What  is  scientific  evidence?" 
Is  not  Sir  Oliver  Lodge  a  scientist?  Of  those 
scientific  men  who  have  attempted  an  open- 
minded  study  of  the  subject,  have  not  at 
least  a  good  proportion  come  to  the  con- 
clusion that  the  existence  of  the  supernat- 
ural can  be  proved,  and  that  phenomena  of 
a  non-physical  origin  are  produced  under  cer- 
tain conditions?  That  the  results  of  present 
day  communications  with  the  spirit  world 
are  for  the  most  part  very  unsatisfactory  has 
no  bearing  on  the  reality  of  the  communi- 
cations. But  of  that,  more  in  what  follows. 
Our  point  now  is  that  there  are  "natural 
32 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


laws"  — if  we  want  to  call  them  that  — 
under  which  it  would  be  possible  for  God 
to  speak  with  men  if  He  chose  to  do  so. 
For  Him  to  do  so  would  involve  no  change 
in  the  constitution  of  the  universe,  even  as 
we  now  know  it. 

If  we  admit,  then,  that  God  had  a  reason 
for  speaking  with  men,  and  that  He  could  do 
so,  the  next  question  must  be  as  to  the  form 
which  His  speech,  or  revelation  of  Himself, 
would  take.    How  would  God  speak? 

Assuredly  in  our  language,  since  we  could 
understand  no  other.  And  when  I  say  "  our 
language,"  I  do  not,  of  course,  mean  any 
particular  tongue,  but  rather  the  body  of  hu- 
man concepts  and  ideas  upon  which,  with 
some  incidental  variations,  all  our  languages 
are  based.  In  other  words,  God  must  express 
Himself  to  man  in  terms  of  human  thought. 
Now  a  main  characteristic  of  human  thought 
is  that  it  almost  always  tends,  unconscious- 
ly or  consciously,  to  clothe  itself  in  symbols. 

33 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 

Purely  abstract  thinking  is  impossible  ex- 
cept to  a  limited  degree  and  for  a  very 
limited  time.  Indeed,  the  gift  of  thinking 
abstractly  at  all  has  come  comparatively  late 
in  human  evolution.  Even  today  there  exist 
people  ^  who  cannot  think  of  abstract  qualities 
as  such.  Their  language  has  no  adjectives. 
When  they  want  to  say  a  thing  is  hard,  they 
say  it  is  "like  a  stone, "  when  round,  it  is  "like 
the  moon,"  and  so  on.  (See  White,  "Mecha- 
nisms of  Character  Formation,"  p.  84.) 
Most  of  our  own  words  for  abstract  qualities 
have  at  least  their  origin  in  a  like  material 
symbolism.  Thus  we  speak  of  "high"  mo- 
tives, a  "warm"  heart,  a  "clear"  idea,  a 
"keen"  perception,  a  "cogent"  (holding- 
together)  argument,  and  so  on.  Instances 
might  be  piled  up  indefinitely.  In  most 
of  these  cases  we  have  almost  ceased  to  be 
conscious  of  employing  a  symbol,  and  in 
some  we  are  entirely  so.    We  do  not  stop 

'The  Tasmanian  aborigines. 

34 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


to  think,  when  we  call  a  man  "assiduous," 
that  we  really  mean  he  sits  right  down  to 
his  work,  but  that  is  what  the  word  means, 
nevertheless.  Small  wonder  that  the  study 
of  symbolism  is  becoming  one  of  the  central 
elements  in  the  new  psychology. 

Where  does  this  universal  tendency  to 
make  use  of  symbols  come  from?  It  is  a 
thing  to  which  we  have  grown  so  accustomed 
that  we  seldom  think  of  it,  but  it  must  have 
an  origin  somewhere.  For  Emanuel  Sweden- 
borg,  whose  study  of  the  subject  even  mod- 
ern scientists  have  not  yet  caught  up  with, 
it  rests  in  the  very  nature  of  things.  It  is  to 
him,  in  fact,  the  explanation  of  the  ancient 
problem  of  the  relation  between  mind  and 
matter.  Matter,  he  says,  is  but  the  outward 
symbol  and  expression  of  mind,  or  spirit. 
Each  material  object  is  the  sensible  ana- 
logue, or  "correspondence,"  of  a  spiritual 
quality.  Each,  in  its  sphere,  performs  a 
function  similar  to  that  of  the  other.  As 
35 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


love  warms  the  soul,  heat  warms  the  body. 
As  an  argument  is  based  upon  a  solid  fact,  a 
house  is  founded  on  a  rock.  This  is  not  to 
say  that  matter  has  no  real  existence,  or 
that  its  facts  and  laws  can  safely  be  ignored; 
simply  that  matter,  with  its  facts  and  laws, 
exists  from  and  because  of  spirit,  from  which 
it  took  its  origin.  The  natural  universe  in- 
deed exists,  but  it  does  so  because  there 
is  a  spiritual  universe,  of  which  it  is  the 
outward,  visible  and  sensible  manifestation. 

It  is  from  his  ancestral  consciousness  of 
this  close  relationship  between  matter  and 
spirit  that  a  man  takes  so  naturally  to  the 
use  of  symbols.  That,  being  ignorant  of  the 
law  on  which  they  should  be  based,  he  fre- 
quently misuses  them,  does  not  affect  the 
fact.  It  is  the  fact  of  symbolism  or  corre- 
spondence that  has  made  it  possible  for  God 
to  reveal  His  infinite  and  spiritual  ideas  to 
man.  It  is  in  terms  of  symbolism  that  the 
Holy  Bible,  which  is  God's  one  complete 
36 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


revelation  of  Himself  to  man,  is  written  in 
every  part;  and  because  of  this  it  is  possible 
for  what  is  apparently  a  very  human,  fallible 
book  to  be  Divine  in  character  and  infinite 
in  meaning. 

I  know  only  too  well  how  strangely  such 
a  statement  falls  upon  the  modern  ear.  The 
idea  of  a  symbolic  interpretation  of  the  Scrip- 
tures is  no  new  one  —  it  is  at  least  as  old  as 
Origen  —  and  has  been,  in  the  minds  of  mod- 
ern scholars,  quite  conclusively  discredited. 
But  the  trouble  with  the  old  attempts  at 
symbolic  interpretation  was  that  they  had 
no  scientific  basis.  Exegesis  was  a  simple 
matter  of  intuition.  If  one  man  said  that 
a  certain  symbol  meant  one  thing  and  an- 
other, another,  neither  could  prove  the  other 
wrong  or  himself  right.  What  Sweden- 
borg  calls  the  "science  of  correspondences" 
leaves  no  room  for  guess  work,  since  it 
deals  with  a  symbolism  based  upon  the  very 
nature  of  things.  Light  can  mean  nothing 
37 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


but  truth  because  it  is  the  one  material  em- 
bodiment of  that  by  which  the  soul  sees. 

How  could  a  book  which  had  no  more  than 
a  literal,  surface  meaning  properly  be^  or  be 
called  Divine?  It  would,  indeed,  inevi- 
tably grow  out  of  date,  as  some  men  think 
the  Bible  has.  While  there  are  certain  fun- 
damental human  interests  which  remain 
the  same  from  age  to  age  —  love,  conflict, 
sacrifice,  and  so  on,  for  example  —  still  the 
forms  in  which  these  clothe  themselves 
change  so  completely  as  in  time  to  rob  the 
noblest  ancient  treatment  of  them  of  direct 
appeal.  Considering  the  two  things  in 
themselves,  who  would  not  rather  read  of 
the  World  War  than  of  the  wars  of  Israel? 
It  is  only  as  we  learn  to  see  in  Israel  a 
Divinely  chosen  symbol  of  all  struggling 
humanity  that  her  history  assumes  a  mean- 
ing which  can  never  lose  its  power.  And 
till  the  world  comes  to  recognize  her  and 
the  other  figures  of  the  Bible  history  as  sym- 
38 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


bols,  God's  Word  never  will  again  possess 
the  power  over  men  that  it  once  had.  With 
a  symbolic  understanding  of  the  Bible, 
all  its  superficial  imperfections  and  inaccu- 
racies drop  out  of  sight.  The  story  of  the 
Creation  may  not  harmonize  with  known 
facts  of  geology,  but  is  perfect  as  a  history  of 
the  growth  of  the  human  soul.  Even  a  seem- 
ingly barbaric  statement  like  the  Psalmist's 
curse  on  Babylon,  "Happy  he. that  taketh 
and  dasheth  thy  little  ones  against  the 
stones"  (Ps.  cxxxvii,  9),  takes  on  a  wholly 
new  aspect  when  we  realize  that  the  "  little 
ones  "  in  question  are  the  beginnings  of  evil 
passion,  and  that  the  "  stones"  are  the  solid 
facts  of  God's  Commandments. 

It  is,  of  course,  impossible  in  the  brief 
space  of  time  at  our  disposal  to  give  any  real 
idea  of  how  the  science  of  correspondences 
opens  up  the  inner  meaning  of  the  Word  of 
God  —  how,  to  take  just  one  more  example, 
the  account  of  the  first  three  kings  of  Israel 
39 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


describes  the  growth  of  reason  in  the  ado- 
lescent mind,  and  so  on.  I  can  but  urge 
whoever  may  be  interested  to  a  further  study 
of  the  subject,  on  which  there  exists  today 
quite  a  considerable  literature  in  addition 
to  the  works  of  Swedenborg  himself.  I  will, 
however,  venture  one  assertion.  If  there  is 
any  passage  in  the  Scripture  which  the  science 
of  correspondences  cannot  unravel,  or  if  in 
any  instance  it  is  found  necessary  for  the 
purpose  of  interpretation  to  depart  from  the 
basic  law  which  has  already  been  stated 
(that  is,  the  law  of  an  exact  analogy  between 
the  spiritual  and  the  natural),  then  all  that 
has  been  said  will  be  discredited.  I  say  that 
no  such  case  ever  has  been  found,  or  ever 
will  be.  The  proof  of  the  key  is  that  it  fits 
the  lock;  and  if  you  do  not  believe  me,  try 
it  for  yourself. 

One  objection  which  is  often  made  to  such 
a  symbolic  interpretation  of  the  Bible  as  I 
have  tried  to  outline  is  that  it  tends  to  take 
40 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 

away  from  men  the  Bible  that  they  have 
already — that  by  "explaining  away"  the 
Scripture's  literal  meaning  it  tends  rather 
away  from  real  faith  in  the  Bible  than  to- 
ward it.  This  is  simply  not  the  case.  The 
science  of  correspondences  leaves  the  letter 
of  the  Bible  as  just  what  it  is  today — the 
Divinely  guided  utterance  of  the  noblest 
thoughts  and  highest  inspirations  that  have 
ever  come  to  men.  God  did  indeed  speak 
to  men  through  the  immortal  letter  of  His 
Word.  The  sayings  that  are  put  into  His 
mouth  are  actually  His  sayings,  the  Com- 
mandments His  eternal  laws.  At  each  stage 
of  men's  development  He  told  them  literally 
and  directly  just  as  much  of  His  truth  as  they 
were  then  able  and  ready  to  receive.  More 
than  this  He  did  not,  in  the  hteral  sense, 
attempt,  because  there  would  have  been  no 
use  in  doing  so.  In  all  external  matters  — 
matters  of  science,  sociology,  even  of  outward 
morals  —  He  made  use  of  the  conceptions 
41 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 

which  were  already  in  men's  minds.  From 
their  then  point  of  view,  He  told  them  the 
next  good  thing  that  they  should  attempt; 
and  this  is  why  the  moral  standard  of  the 
Bible  is  so  obviously  higher  at  the  end  than 
at  the  beginning.  But  within  all  that  was 
said  to  certain  men  at  a  certain  time,  He  hid 
a  message  to  all  men  in  all  time.  Within  the 
letter  which,  by  itself,  "killeth,"  He  put  the 
spirit  which  "giveth  life." 

So  the  apparent  inaccuracies  and  contra- 
dictions of  the  Bible  have,  as  I  have  said, 
no  terrors  for  the  spiritual  student  of  it,  for 
he  realizes  that  it  was  not  science  or  philo- 
sophy that  God's  Word  was  meant  primarily 
to  teach.  Those  parts  of  it  which  take  the 
form  of  history  are  doubtless  based  upon 
historic  fact  —  or  at  least  on  the  view  of 
fact  held  at  the  time  when  they  were  written 
—  but  the  history  is  of  secondary  importance. 
What  is  important  is  that  God  chose  these 
stories  or  these  legends  as  a  means  of  teach- 
42 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


ing  all  mankind  His  nature  and  His  purposes. 
It  is  to  know  these  and  to  see  their  applica- 
tion to  our  lives  that  we  should  read  the 
Bible. 

You  will  perhaps  have  wondered  how  God 
ventured  to  conceal  His  message  to  man- 
kind in  such  a  way,  how  He  could  know  that 
it  would  not  be  overlooked.  But  the  es- 
sential divine  laws  of  human  conduct  are 
not  such  as  needed  to  be  veiled  in  any  age, 
for,  while  their  forms  change,  they  do  not. 
So  in  the  Bible  any  honest  man,  though  with 
no  knowledge  of  the  fact  of  symbolism,  can 
find  for  himself  the  way  of  righteous  hving, 
and  uncounted  multitudes  have  found  it  there 
from  the  beginning.  As  it  is  so  beautifully 
put  by  Swedenborg:  "The  Word  in  (the 
literal)  sense  is  like  a  man  clothed,  whose 
face  and  hands  are  bare.  All  that  concerns 
man's  life,  and  so  his  salvation,  is  bare;  the 
rest  is  clothed."  The  man  who  is  content 
with  the  Bible  as  it  is  will  find  in  it  a  full 
43 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN? 


store  of  spiritual  food;  but  for  the  man  of 
the  new  age,  of  restless,  questing,  probing 
mind,  there  is  in  its  symbolic,  spiritual  sense 
a  treasure  house  whose  stores  he  never  can 
exhaust. 

I  have  sought  all  along  rather  to  show 
how  the  Holy  Bible  can  be  the  actual  Word 
of  God  to  men  than  to  prove  that  it  is  such. 
This  was  of  intention,  since  the  nature  of  the 
Bible,  like  the  Deity  of  Jesus  Christ,  is  not  a 
matter  of  proof  so  much  as  of  intuition.  If 
one  can  humbly  and  sincerely  read  the  Bible 
without  feeling  —  without  knowing  somehow 
in  his  heart  of  hearts  —  that  it  is  different 
from  and  greater  than  all  other  books,  there 
is  not  much  that  can  be  said  to  him.  The 
supreme  evidence  that  the  Bible  is  Divine 
comes  not  from  the  outside,  but  from  within 
itself.  It  will  speak  its  own  message  to  the 
listening  soul  far  better  than  the  feeble 
words  of  man  can  paraphrase  it.  All  that 
a  study  of  this  kind  can  hope  to  do  is  to  help 
44 


CAN  GOD  SPEAK  WITH  MEN  ? 


brush  aside  some  of  the  intellectual  difl&cul- 
ties  which  impede  our  hearing.  By  its  own 
nature,  by  its  formative  effect  upon  two 
human  civilizations,  by  its  deathless  message 
to  the  heart  of  every  one  who  reads  it,  the 
Divine  Book  of  Books  will  of  itself  proclaim 
and  prove  forever  that,  "The  words  that  I 
speak  unto  you,  they  are  spirit,  and  they 
are  life." 


45 


m 


DO  MEN  DIE? 

Now,  that  the  dead  are  raised,  even 
Moses  showed  at  the  bush,  when  he 
called  the  Lord  the  God  of  Abraham, 
and  the  God  of  Isaac,  and  the  God  of 
Jacob.  For  he  is  not  a  God  of  the  dead, 
but  of  the  living:  for  to  him  all  are 
living.    (Luke  xx,  37,  38.) 

DO  men  die?  There  may  be  those  to 
whom  this  seems  an  idle  question. 
For  there  were  days  not  long  ago  when  death 
to  many  of  us  fell  almost  to  a  commonplace, 
when  the  results  of  war  and  pestilence 
made  the  "King  of  Terrors"  only  too  fami- 
liar to  us.  Still  I  submit  that  nothing  that 
we  saw  gives  a  real  answer  to  the  question, 
"Do  men  die?"  We  saw  their  bodies  die, 
and,  when  the  opportunity  was  offered,  laid 
them  reverently  in  the  earth  from  which  they 
46 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


came,  but  of  what  happened  to  the  men 
themselves  we  could  see  nothing.  For  the 
time  is  past  when  thinking  people  could  say 
of  the  few  score  pounds  of  animated  dust 
that  constitute  a  human  body  that  they  are 
a  man.  Even  the  scientists,  who  in  their 
proper  study  of  matter  are  a  little  apt  to 
lose  sight  of  the  other  phases  of  reality,  are 
at  last  being  forced  to  recognize  that  there 
is  something  in  us  which  is  immaterial.  Two 
recent  scientific  statements  are  worth  study- 
ing in  this  connection.  Dr.  Charles  Basker- 
ville,  a  well  known  chemist,  said  in  an  inter- 
view: 

Though  we  know  that  the  human  brain  works 
as  the  result  of  the  action  of  material  cells,  there 
is  something  there  that  certainly  is  not  material; 
something  that  cannot  be  explained  on  any  purely 
material  hypothesis.  This  is  the  mind,  the  spirit- 
ual part  of  man,  no  less  real  than  the  material, 
and,  though  dependent  on  the  material  for  its 
power  to  express  itself,  far  more  important  than 
the  material. 


47 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


From  quite  a  different  point  of  view  — 
that  of  the  psychologist  —  M.  A.  G.  Tansley 
comes  to  a  similar  conclusion.  In  his  book, 
"The  New  Psychology  in  Its  Relation  to 
Life,"  he  says: 

Thought  and  emotion  as  we  know  them  are 
absolutely  sui  generis  and  we  do  not  get  the  least 
nearer  to  an  understanding  of  them  by  believing 
(or,  for  that  matter,  disbeheving)  that  they  are 
produced  by  brain  processes.  The  nature  of  the 
connection  which  certainly  exists  is  absolutely 
beyond  our  ken.  We  are  thus  driven  to  consider 
the  psychic  sphere  separately  from  the  physical 
sphere,  as  a  distinct  field  for  psychic  investigation, 
with  data,  concepts  and  laws  of  its  own.  We 
must  not  mix  up  physiological  and  psychical  terms 
as  is  often  done  by  popular  writers.  Such  a  phrase, 
constantly  met  with  in  ordinary  writing  and  speak- 
ing, as,  a  thought  flashes  through  my  brain,  is 
quite  illegitimate.  Thoughts  belong  to  the  mind, 
not  to  the  brain,  by  whatever  changes  in  brain 
cells  they  may  be  accompanied. 

Each  of  these  writers  has,  in  his  own  way, 
seen  that  a  body  is  not  a  man.   A  man  has 
48 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


a  body,  but  he  is  something  definitely  and 
recognizably  more.  He  is  an  individual,  a 
personality,  a  soul,  or,  in  the  Biblical  term, 
a  spirit.  "God  is  a  spirit,"  so  the  Master 
tells  us,  and  as  He  made  man  in  His  own 
image,  man  must  be  a  spirit  too. 

When,  therefore,  we  approach  the  ques- 
tion, ''Do  men  die?"  what  we  are  really 
asking  is  whether  the  human  spirit  —  the 
real  man  —  is  able  to  survive  the  dissolution 
of  the  body  which  has  clothed  it,  and  by 
means  of  which  it  has  communicated  with 
us  and  with  the  world.  If,  as  Dr.  Basker- 
ville  puts  it,  the  mind  is  "dependent  on  the 
material  for  its  power  to  express  itself,"  can 
it  continue  to  exist  when  its  material  instru- 
ment is  gone? 

Let  it  be  understood,  however,  that  what 
I  am  speaking  of  is  the  whole,  individual 
spirit,  and  not  just  the  spirit  substance,  if 
there  be  such  a  thing.  I  mean  the  whole 
man,  with  his  memory,  personality  and  con- 
49 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


sciousness,  for  all  these  make  the  man.  Those 
who  believe  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
spirit  —  and  to  this  class  most  present  day 
philosophers  unquestionably  belong  —  will 
generally  admit  that  it,  like  matter,  must  be 
indestructible;  but  there  are  many  who  in- 
cline to  think  that  spirit,  again  like  matter, 
may  take  different  forms  at  different  times, 
and  that  the  spiritual  substance  which  to- 
day goes  to  make  up  the  soul  of  one  man 
may  in  future  times  exist  within  that  of  an- 
other. If  this  be  true,  the  answer  to  our 
question  is  affirmative.  Men  do  die.  For 
it  is  memory  and  individuality  that  make 
up  a  man  as  such,  and  if  these  perish,  then 
it  is  the  end  of  him.  What  is  it  to  me  that, 
after  I  am  dead,  the  substance  of  my  spirit 
is  embodied  in  another?  If  I  have  lost  my 
conscious  personality  and  the  sense  of  my 
own  identity,  then  I  am  done  for.  A  com- 
plete annihilation  could  be  no  worse. 
But  what  reason  have  I  for  believing  that 
SO 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


such  will  not  be  the  case?  Upon  what  ra- 
tional basis  can  there  be  set  up  a  hope  of 
individual  immortality? 

That  such  a  hope  has  held  a  place  in  human 
life  as  far  back  as  we  know  about  it,  no  one 
can  deny.  True,  there  have  been  and  are 
exceptions,  but  a  desire  to  live  after  death 
has  been  a  typical  human  characteristic  in 
all  lands  and  times.  Men  have  clung  to  the 
hope  of  immortality  in  the  face  of  physical 
appearance  with  a  desperate  persistence 
which,  if  it  be  unjustified,  we  can  surely  call 
the  most  pathetic  thing  in  all  the  world. 
There  has  been  no  way  in  which  any  new 
religion  or  philosophy  could  quite  so  cer- 
tainly attract  a  following  as  by  some  kind  of 
teaching  of  a  resurrection.  As  a  mere  matter 
of  history,  it  was  this  element  in  Christian- 
ity which  at  first  attracted  to  it  the  wide 
range  of  peoples  out  of  whom  the  early 
Christian  Church  was  formed.  Civilized 
Greek  and  Roman  joined  with  the  painted 
51 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


savages  of  Gaul  and  Britain  in  the  worship 
of  a  Leader  who  was  pictured  to  them  as 
the  Conqueror  of  death.  And  in  its  turn, 
the  wide  spread  of  Christianity  bears  its  own 
witness  to  the  historic  truth  of  the  Resurrec- 
tion story. 

It  is  said  sometimes  nowadays  that  the  de- 
sire to  live  after  death  is  but  a  natural  out- 
growth of  our  selfish  egoism  —  is  in  fact  the 
logical  corollary  of  the  primitive  "will  to 
live."  It  may  be  this  in  part,  but  it  is  also 
very  much  more.  Who  that  has  ever  really 
felt  the  call  of  a  great  work,  what  scientist, 
what  artist,  or  what  poet,  but  has  felt  the 
inadequacy  of  a  single  lifetime  for  the  service 
to  mankind  he  felt  himself  to  be  capable  of 
rendering?  Who  that  has  known  true  friend- 
ship or  a  deep  and  enduring  love  has  not 
felt  that  his  emotion  somehow  must  not  have 
an  end?  If  the  desire  for  eternal  life  were 
but  a  selfish  thing,  we  should  expect  to  find 
those  who  have  cherished  it  themselves  in- 


52 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


human,  selfish,  egotistical;  but  the  fact  is 
just  the  opposite.  As  one  of  our  leading 
American  essayists,  Mr.  E.  S.  Martin,  puts  it: 

In  all  times  lives  geared  to  that  belief  have 
usually  been  the  better  for  it.  It  is  the  very  main- 
spring of  religion,  the  great  warrant  for  resistance 
to  materialism  and  the  notion  that  to  get  all  you 
can  and  enjoy  it  while  you  may  is  the  end  of  human 
life. 

No,  the  "hope  of  everlasting  life"  is  bound 
up  with  all  that  is  noblest  and  most  precious 
in  existence.  But  that  in  itself  is  no  proof 
that  the  hope  is  justified.  Is  there  such 
proof? 

In  the  material  sense,  of  course,  there  is 
not  and  there  cannot  be.  What  we  have 
called  the  soul  of  man  is  by  our  very  defini- 
tion of  it  immaterial,  and  its  power  to  exist 
apart  from  matter  is  the  thing  that  we  are 
trying  to  establish.  But  if  the  soul  exists 
apart  from  matter,  then  it  obviously  cannot 
reach  us  through  our  physical  senses.  Did 
53 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


it  ever,  really?  Even  in  this  life  we  can 
neither  see,  hear,  taste  nor  touch  another's 
soul,  and  yet  we  are  forced  by  reason  to 
admit  that  it  exists.  By  reason  only  can  we 
know  that  it  exists  after  the  body  dies.  If 
we  can  know  of  immortality  it  must  be 
through  our  minds,  not  through  our  senses. 
On  the  other  hand,  if  immortality  cannot  be 
proved  to  sense,  neither  can  sense  disprove 
it.  That  matter  exists  no  more  proves  that 
there  can  be  nothing  immaterial  than  a  horse 
proves  there  can  be  no  other  animal. 

Properly  the  burden  of  proof  should  be 
put  on  those  who  deny  immortality  rather 
than  on  those  who  afl&rm  it.  Have  we  suffi- 
cient evidence  of  the  body's  effect  on  the 
soul  to  justify  our  thinking  that  the  death 
of  one  destroys  the  other?  If,  by  an  accident, 
I  lose  a  limb,  I  am  not  therefore  any  less  my- 
self. Why  should  I  think,  then,  that  the  loss 
of  my  whole  body  will  be  able  to  put  an  end 
to  me? 

54 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


But,  leaving  temporarily  aside  the  question 
of  a  possible  Divine  revelation  on  the  sub- 
ject, there  are  two  great  natural  laws  which 
of  themselves  give  evidence  to  any  reasonable 
mind  that  death  cannot  affect  the  soul. 

One  of  these  is  the  evident  tendency  of 
evolution  to  produce  an  increasingly  com- 
plex universe.  In  the  old  days  of  purely 
theoretical  philosophy  it  was  supposed  that 
unity  and  simplicity  were  the  measure  of 
perfection.  Upon  this  basis  many  thought, 
as  orientals  still  think,  that  the  human  spirit 
must  at  last  be  drawn  back  into  the  One 
from  which  it  came.  But  the  whole  trend 
of  evolution  is  in  just  the  opposite  direction. 
Everywhere  the  newer,  higher  forms  are  more 
elaborate  and  complex  than  their  primitive 
forerunners.  Every  day  the  physical  uni- 
verse becomes  a  little  more  diversified  — 
tends  to  the  production  of  more  highly  dif- 
ferent and  specialized  individuals.  Can  it 
be  otherwise  in  the  spiritual  universe?  Is 
55 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


it  not,  on  the  contrary,  most  probable  that 
the  very  tendency  of  spirit  is  to  split  itself 
into  an  ever-increasing  number  of  individ- 
ual personalities,  each  of  which  shall  not 
only  exist  permanently  but  grow  ever  more 
highly  individualized? 

There  is  another  natural  law  which  gives 
us  evidence  of  the  soul's  immortality  — 
namely,  that  nothing  normally  dies  till  it  has 
ceased  to  grow.  The  fruit  tree  springs  up 
from  a  seedling,  reaches  its  allotted  size, 
bears  fruit,  provides  through  seed  for  future 
fruit  trees,  and  then  dies.  It  could  have 
done  no  more,  however  long  it  might  have 
lived.  The  wild  animal  grows  up,  acquires 
the  instincts  of  its  species,  propagates  and 
perishes.  It  would  be  no  better  and  no  wiser 
if  it  lived  for  centuries.  Even  the  human 
body  reaches  physical  perfection  with  matur- 
ity and  instantly  begins  its  lingering  process 
of  decay.  Just  of  itself,  it  would  be  no  more 
efficient  as  an  instrument  if  it  survived  for- 
S6 


DO  MEN  DIE? 

ever;  for  the  various  accomplishments  which 
we  habitually  call  physical  dexterity  are  not 
actually  in  the  body,  but  in  the  mind.  If  it 
were  possible  for  the  mind,  say,  of  a  pianist 
to  be  transferred  to  another  body,  he  would 
need  but  a  little  muscular  development  to 
be  able  to  play  as  well  as  ever.  But  when 
we  come  to  the  mind  and  soul  of  man  —  to 
man  himself  —  we  have  a  thing  which  is  un- 
like any  of  those  of  which  we  have  been 
speaking.  A  man  never  need  stop  growing  — 
never  does,  in  fact,  except  by  his  own  lazi- 
ness. There  are  no  known  or  imaginable 
limits  to  the  powers  of  the  human  soul.  Do 
you  suppose  that  Shakespeare  would  have 
written  no  more  plays  if  he  had  lived  in 
physical  vigor  for  another  hundred  years? 
Was  Lincoln's  power  to  impassion  men  for 
freedom  limited  by  the  assassin's  bullet? 
Would  he  not  have  a  message  for  today  if  he 
had  lived  and  kept  his  faculties  so  long?  To 
the  man  with  a  li"ving,  active  mind  each 
57 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


day  opens  new  vistas,  every  hour  reveals 
new  interests,  and  his  mental  treasure  only 
grows  the  richer  with  the  passing  of  the  years. 
Surely  the  soul  of  man  must  be  immortal, 
since  the  very  essence  of  it  is  eternal  growth. 

But  above  all  considerations  of  nature  or 
of  natural  law,  our  faith  in  immortality 
must  rest  on  our  belief  in  nature's  God.  If 
God  is,  immortality  must  be,  and  if  He  is  not 
it  cannot  be  —  for  surely  no  material  energy 
could  produce  an  immortal  soul.  A  God 
who  made  men  only  to  wipe  them  out  of 
existence  after  a  few  short  and  unsatisfying 
years  of  life  —  who  planted  in  the  breasts 
of  men  a  hope  He  had  no  thought  of  realiz- 
ing —  such  would  be  no  true  God,  but  an 
unclean  and  cruel  monster.  For,  say  what 
one  will  of  life  in  this  world  —  and  for  many 
of  us  it  can  be  a  very  splendid  and  inspiring 
thing  —  still  when  it  is  considered  as  a  whole, 
with  all  its  imperfections,  disappointments, 
tragedies,  frustrations,  above  all  its  utter 
58 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


incompleteness,  it  is  meaningless  without  the 
hope  of  another  life  to  follow  it.  Regarded 
as  a  training  school,  the  world  we  know  can 
be  explained  and  understood;  but  in  itself 
it  is  without  coherence  or  significance.  No 
wonder  that  materialistic  thinkers  have  de- 
veloped a  philosophy  of  ''resignationism," 
that  they  say,  "The  answer  to  the  riddle  of 
the  universe  is  that  there  is  no  answer." 
There  is  indeed  no  answer  —  but  a  life  be- 
yond the  grave. 

Again  we  say,  "If  God  is,  immortality 
must  be."  That  the  soul  should  perish  at 
the  end  of  earthly  life  would  imply  a  Deity 
as  stupid  as  He  would  be  cruel.  We  have 
seen  that  the  soul  is,  at  the  time  of  death, 
but  on  the  threshold  of  its  growth.  If  God 
should  then  decree  its  dissolution,  it  would 
be  as  though  I  should  set  out  an  orchard  and, 
just  as  the  trees  began  to  blossom,  cut  them 
down.  If  no  wise  man  would  think  of  such 
a  folly,  how  can  God,  the  all- wise,  even  be 
59 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


imagined  as  permitting  it?  No!  As  surely 
as  God  lives,  so  surely  will  He  sometime  give 
us  opportunity  to  use  to  the  full  the  powers 
of  growth  and  service  with  which  he  has  en- 
dowed us. 

I  have  said  that  the  soul's  immortality 
could  not  possibly  be  proved  to  the  material 
senses ;  but  I  did  not  mean  by  this  that  there 
can  be  no  manifestation  of  the  ultimate  ex- 
istence to  those  who  are  still  on  earth.  Such 
events  have  taken  place  repeatedly  in  human 
history,  and  may  even,  in  a  certain  sense, 
take  place  today.  They  may  seem,  to  those 
who  do  not  understand  them,  to  employ  the 
physical  senses,  but  they  do  not  really  do  so. 
We  have  thought  of  the  physical  body  with 
its  senses  as  a  thing  distinct  from  the  spirit, 
but  sensation  itself,  though  it  makes  use  of 
physical  organs,  is  a  spiritual  thing.  The 
eye  does  not  really  see;  it  is  seen  through. 
The  ear  serves  only  as  a  sort  of  telephone  by 
which  the  spirit  hears.  And  since  sensation 
60 


DO  MEN  DIE? 

is  a  quality  of  the  spirit,  and  yet  must  have 
organs  through  which  it  can  operate,  it  follows 
that  the  spirit  must  itself  have  organs,  and  a 
body  to  which  they  belong.  As  Paul  says, 
"There  is  a  natural  body,  and  there  is  a  spir- 
itual body."  Furthermore,  as  conscious  life 
is  inconceivable  except  in  an  objective  en- 
vironment, there  must  be  a  spiritual  world, 
in  which  the  spiritual  body  dwells.  Yet,  in- 
asmuch as  time  and  space  are  qualities  of 
matter,  and  a  spiritual  world  can  have  no 
matter  in  it,  therefore  time  and  space  cannot 
exist  in  that  world,  except  in  the  minds  of 
its  inhabitants;  and  therefore  also,  we  can- 
not say  that  the  spiritual  world  is  here  or 
there,  since  it  is  actually  everywhere.  This 
is  what  Jesus  meant  when  He  said,  "The 
kingdom  of  heaven  is  within  you."  For  as 
the  material  world  embraces  all  of  matter, 
and  all  matter  is  in  the  material  world,  just 
so  the  spiritual  world  embraces  all  of  spirit, 
and  our  souls,  being  spirit,  are  in  that  world 
6i 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


even  now.  All  that  takes  place  at  death  is 
that  our  consciousness,  being  deprived  of  the 
organs  by  which  it  is  made  aware  of  this 
world,  turns  to  its  spiritual  senses  and  lives 
in  the  world  of  spirit. 

This  process  can,  however,  take  place  tem- 
porarily in  certain  cases  before  the  time  of 
death,  and  it  is  thus  that  manifestations  of 
the  spirit  world  to  people  here  must  be 
explained.  The  immaterial  has  not  been 
"materialized,"  as  some  have  thought;  but 
men  who  still  lived  in  material  bodies  have 
had  spiritual  senses  opened.  Thus  it  was 
that  all  the  supernatural  apparitions  took 
place  which  we  read  of  in  the  Bible.  Not 
in  the  land  of  Canaan  but  in  the  spiritual 
world,  not  with  their  physical  but  with 
their  spiritual  vision  did  such  men  as 
Abraham,  Moses,  Joshua,  Manoah  and  so 
many  others  see  "the  angel  of  the  Lord." 
Not  with  their  physical  eyes,  indeed,  did 
the  disciples  see  the  risen  Lord  Himself, 
62 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


for  as  the  story  shows  the  body  in  which 
He  appeared  to  them  was  not  a  ma- 
terial one.  (Did  He  not  pass  through  the 
closed  doors?)  And  to  some  partial  opening 
of  the  spiritual  senses  must  be  credited  all 
that  is  genuine  in  the  so-called  "psychic 
phenomena"  to  which  men  like  Sir  Oliver 
Lodge  and  Sir  Arthur  Conan  Doyle  are  giv- 
ing so  much  attention  at  the  present  day. 
There  will  be  no  real  understanding  of  such 
phenomena  till  this  fact  is  grasped. 

But  while  the  results  of  modern  spiritism, 
when  intelligently  understood,  furnish  an  in- 
teresting confirmation  of  what  may  be  learned 
from  other  sources,  they  are  in  themselves 
more  apt  than  otherwise  to  be  misleading, 
if  not  actually  dangerous.  Communications 
from  a  person  whose  identity  we  cannot 
know,  and  whose  veracity  we  have  no  means 
of  verifying,  cannot  in  their  very  nature  be 
of  any  great  value;  and  this  is  but  too  evi- 
dent from  most  of  the  results  that  have  been 

63 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


published.  All  that  these  really  show  is  that 
the  spirits  in  question  have  the  power  to  read 
our  minds,  and  that  they  tell  us  what  we 
already  think  or  want  to  think.  (Take,  for 
example,  what  the  spirits  told  the  Rev.  Basil 
King,  who  is  a  Canadian,  of  the  spiritual 
virtues  of  the  Canadian  people.)  This  is 
entirely  in  harmony  with  the  Bible's  teach- 
ing that  communication  with  the  spirit  world 
is  possible,  but  that  it  is  dangerous  except 
when  it  comes  by  Divine  permission,  and 
unsought. 

While  the  accounts  in  the  Bible  are  and 
must  be  the  basis  of  all  positive  knowledge 
in  regard  to  the  future  life,  there  is  one  rela- 
tively modern  case  of  spiritual  illumination 
which  is  worthy  of  consideration  by  all 
thoughtful  people,  and  especially  because  in 
all  its  details  it  is  absolutely  unique.  I  refer 
to  the  case  of  Emanuel  Swedenborg,  who 
claimed  that  he  possessed  from  God  the  power 
of  transferring  his  consciousness  from  the 
64 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


natural  to  the  spiritual  world  at  will,  and 
this  for  over  thirty  years.  Nothing  in  litera- 
ture is  at  all  comparable  with  his  book, 
"Heaven  and  Hell,  from  Things  Heard  and 
Seen."  Here  was  a  man  who,  if  he  was  not 
absolutely  deluded,  was  in  an  entirely  differ- 
ent situation  from  all  "mediums"  before  or 
since.  He  was  not  at  the  mercy  of  the  spirits, 
for  he  dwelt  in  their  world  consciously.  He 
could  talk  with  them  face  to  face  and  in  their 
own  environment,  and  so  could  form  a  crit- 
ical estimate  of  them  such  as  is  impossible 
to  others.  Of  the  contrast  between  him  and 
other  "  psychics,"  the  late  William  Dean 
Howells  said: 

There  is,  in  fact,  nothing  in  the  things  reported 
from  Raymond  [Sir  Oliver  Lodge's  son]  which 
may  not  be  paralleled  and  amplified  a  thousand- 
fold from  the  Memorabilia  of  Swedenborg.  His 
one  work,  "Heaven  and  Hell,"  is  a  storehouse 
of  experiences  and  observations  which,  whether 
we  allow  them  to  be  genuine  or  not,  are  still  of  an 
extent  and  variety  which  far  transcend  all  sub- 

6S 


DO  MEN  DIE? 


sequent  communications.  The  things  told  by 
Raymond  ....  are  the  commonplaces  of  Sweden- 
borg's  revelation  and  philosophy.  Raymond's 
facts,  if  we  may  call  his  fragmentary  and  discon- 
nected responses  so,  with  the  struggles  of  the  me- 
diums for  inteUigible  statements,  might  all  have 
been  derived  from  the  superabundant  testimony 
of  the  books  where  every  fact  of  a  world  neither 
unknown  nor  unknowable  is  so  amply  set  down 
that  curiosity  is  almost  sated. 

Again  he  speaks  of  Swedenborg  as  writing 
with  "such  dignity  as  shall  make  the  gibber- 
ish of  the  ordinary  'control'  of  the  ordinary 
medium  seem  an  affront  to  the  human  intel- 
ligence." 

With  a  full  consciousness  of  the  stark  in- 
credulity which  such  a  claim  as  Swedenborg's 
is  bound  to  arouse  at  the  first  hearing,  I 
nevertheless  dare  to  assert  that  an  impar- 
tial study  of  his  writings  will  lead  almost  any- 
one to  conclude,  as  I  have,  that  there  is  no 
explanation  that  will  fit  his  case  but  that 
which  he  himself  gives  to  it.  If,  as  the 
66 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 

Savior  said,  the  dead  are  living  —  notice  He 
said,  "are  living,"  not  "will  live"  at  some 
future  time  —  then  it  is  only  natural  that  God 
in  His  goodness  should  have  given  us  some 
knowledge  of  the  state  in  which  they  live. 
And  in  that  very  goodness  is  the  test  of  every 
putative  revelation.  There  is  an  old  and 
cowardly  saying  that  a  thing  is  "too  good  to 
be  true."  But  if  our  God  is  infinite  goodness, 
then  the  better  and  more  perfect  any  pic- 
ture of  the  destiny  He  has  prepared  for  us, 
the  more  sure  we  may  be  of  its  truth.  And 
if  Emanuel  Swedenborg's  picture  of  eternal 
life  in  a  real  world,  where  every  soul  is  given 
opportunity  to  develop  to  its  fullest  in  the 
very  surroundings  which  are  most  appro- 
priate to  it,  where  God  forces  no  man  into 
heaven  and  condemns  no  man  to  hell,  where 
"all  we  have  willed  or  hoped  or  dreamed  of 
good  shall  exist "  —  if,  I  say,  such  a  picture 
strikes  in  the  soul  of  each  of  us  an  echo  of 
instinctive  recognition,  may  we  not  dare  to 
67 


DO  MEN  DIE  ? 


say  that  here  at  last  God  has  Himself  given 
the  full  and  final  answer  to  our  question, 
"Do  men  die?" 

How,  indeed,  can  men  die  when  God  Him- 
self, as  He  was  manifest  in  the  flesh,  gave 
His  undying  promise,  "Because  I  live,  ye 
shall  live  also"? 


68 


IV 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


Ye  know  that  the  princes  of  the  Gentiles 
exercise  dominion  over  them,  and  they 
that  are  great  exercise  authority  upon 
them; 

But  it  shall  not  be  so  among  you:  but  who- 
soever will  be  great  among  you,  let  him 
be  your  minister; 

And  whosoever  will  be  chief  among  you, 
let  him  be  your  servant: 

Even  as  the  Son  of  man  came  not  to  be 
ministered  unto,  but  to  minister,  and 
to  give  his  life  a  ransom  for  many. 


(St.  Matt.  XX,  25-29.) 
IHE  word  "religion"  comes  to  us  from 


X  the  Latin,  and  is  presumably  derived 
from  the  roots  re  (back)  and  ligo  (to  tie  or 
bind).  The  earliest  historic  concept  of  re- 
ligion, therefore,  is  that  of  a  force  which 
holds  or  ties  men  back  from  certain  acts 
which  they  would  otherwise  perform.  There 


69 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


has,  however,  also  been  in  the  word  from  the 
beginning  the  implication  of  a  particular 
kind  of  force  —  the  force  of  some  sort  of 
belief  in  the  supernatural.  Thus  the  full 
primitive  conception  of  religion  is  a  recogni- 
tion of  the  fact  that  certain  things  which  we 
should  otherwise  desire  to  do  may  not  be 
done  because  they  are  opposed  to  the  will 
of  some  supernatural  power.  Supernatural 
power,  however,  is  not  a  thing  which  prim- 
itive minds  are  capable  of  picturing  abstractly 
or  impersonally;  therefore,  what  came  to  be 
the  dominant  thought  in  religion  was  that 
of  the  will  of  the  gods. 

From  this  standpoint  it  is  easily  seen  that 
the  ethical  character  of  a  religion  will  depend 
on  the  view  held  as  to  the  ethical  standards 
of  the  gods  themselves.  If  they  are  cruel, 
tyrannical  or  domineering,  then  religion  will 
partake  of  the  same  character.  Their  es- 
sential attribute  is  not  necessarily  moral  ex- 
cellence, but  power,  and  it  is  their  power 
70 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


which  makes  men's  obedience  to  them  the 
part  of  wisdom.  Furthermore,  their  power 
and  authority  are  things  of  which  they  may 
well  be  expected  to  be  jealous,  and  accord- 
ingly the  best  way  for  a  man  to  avoid  their 
anger  and  to  win  their  favor  is  by  emphazing 
the  difference  between  himself  and  them. 
He  may  do  this  in  any  one  of  several  ways  — 
by  acts  of  worship,  by  a  generally  humble 
attitude,  or,  perhaps  best  of  all,  by  one  form 
or  another  of  self-persecution.  By  giving  up 
the  things  he  likes  to  do,  and  even  by  inflict- 
ing physical  injury  upon  himself  or  upon  his 
family,  he  may  be  fairly  sure  of  winning  the 
divine  favor.  This  is  the  typically  pagan 
view  of  religion,  which  not  only  has  existed 
in  most  of  the  religions  of  the  past,  but  even 
at  the  present  time  and  in  Christianity  it- 
self dies  very  hard  indeed. 

The  Jews  were  originally  pagans,  so  that 
we  may  expect  to  find  strong  elements  of 
paganism  in  their  religious  ideas  —  and  this 
71 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


although  we  believe  that  their  religion  itself 
was  a  veritable  revelation  from  God.  For 
it  is  impossible  to  put  into  a  man's  mind 
ideas  which  are  entirely  at  variance  with 
his  previous  conceptions,  and  it  is  equally 
impossible  to  give  a  man  any  ideas  without 
their  being  modified  by  his  previous  con- 
ceptions and  by  his  habits  of  thought. 
When,  therefore.  Divine  Revelation  first 
came  to  the  Jews  it  had  to  be  in  a  form 
not  too  much  out  of  keeping  with  their 
earlier  ideas  —  that  is  to  say,  it  had  to  be  a 
modified  and  slightly  spiritualized  paganism. 
Anything  more  than  this  they  would  have 
been  as  unable  to  grasp  as  a  child  would  be 
to  grasp  the  differential  calculus. 

Hence  primitive  Judaism  rejected  human 
sacrifice  and  self-torture,  but  retained  and 
even  encouraged  animal  sacrifice.  And  there 
is  little  to  indicate  that  the  average  Jew  saw 
any  special  ethical  meaning  even  in  the  Ten 
Commandments.  These,  along  with  the 
72 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


multifarious  and  wearisome  observances  of 
the  ceremonial  law,  were  to  be  obeyed,  not 
primarily  because  they  had  a  moral  import- 
ance, but  because  Jehovah  had  commanded 
them  and  would  sternly  punish  disobedience. 

This  is  not  to  say  that  no  higher  idea  of 
religion  ever  existed  among  the  Jews.  On 
the  contrary,  the  Divine  effort  to  lead  men 
to  see  God's  law  as  a  moral  force  is  evident 
on  every  page  of  the  Old  Testament  if  one 
will  look  for  it.  In  the  later  prophets  es- 
pecially, the  thought  of  God  as  the  em- 
bodiment and  source  of  righteousness —  as 
one  who  wiU  be  satisfied  with  nothing  less 
than  a  moral  service  from  His  people  —  the 
thought  of  religion  as  a  Divine  ethical  sys- 
tem, is  expressed  with  a  force  and  eloquence 
never  since  surpassed.  "The  righteous  God 
loveth  righteousness."  "Ye  people,  rend 
your  hearts  and  not  your  garments."  "The 
sacrifices  of  God  are  a  broken  heart :  a  broken 
and  a  contrite  spirit,  O  Lord,  thou  wilt  not 
73 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


despise."  Such  sayings  as  these  are  the  im- 
perishable jewels  of  our  spiritual  heritage. 
But  there  is  nothing  in  Jewish  history  to 
show  that  such  a  view  of  religion  ever  became 
popular.  On  the  contrary,  even  in  the  Gospel 
times  religion  was  still  for  the  average  Jew 
a  measure  of  formal  self-mortification  prac- 
tised for  reasons  of  immediate  self-interest. 

Then,  having  failed  to  reach  men  through 
the  written  and  spoken  word,  God  made  the 
Word  flesh.  He  resorted  to  the  force  of  liv- 
ing, personal  example.  He  embodied  His 
Divine  nature  in  the  human  personality  of 
Jesus  Christ,  so  that  that  personality  became 
and  is  forever  Divine.  This  was  the  turning 
point  in  the  world's  religious  history.  What- 
ever wrong  ideas  men  might  have  had  as  to 
the  nature  of  God,  they  now  need  hold  them 
no  longer.  God  is  Jesus  Christ!  And  the 
conception  of  religion  which,  as  Christ,  He 
gave  to  men,  was  to  their  previous  ideas  as 
daylight  is  to  darkness.  Gone,  in  the  teach- 
74 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


ing  of  Jesus,  is  the  thought  of  God  as  a  Di- 
vine Tyrant.  He  is  revealed  instead  as  the 
infinitely  loving  Father  of  all  mankind,  mak- 
ing His  sun  to  rise  on  the  evil  and  on  the 
good,  and  sending  rain  on  the  just  and  on  the 
unjust.  Gone,  too,  is  the  thought  that  He 
can  ever  envy  men  their  happiness,  or  need 
to  be  propitiated.  If  He  gives  men  laws,  it 
is  not  to  restrict  them,  but  that  they  may 
have  life,  and  have  it  more  abundantly. 
Again,  and  most  important  of  all,  the  Savior 
taught  that  happiness  itself  is  not  to  be 
attained  by  seeking  it  for  oneself,  but  by 
trying  to  give  it  to  others.  The  one  real 
human  eminence  is  eminence  in  service.  Re- 
ligion henceforth  was  not  to  be  a  twofold  re- 
lation —  between  a  man  and  his  God ;  but 
threefold  —  between  God,  man,  and  man's 
neighbor. 

I  said  the  old,  the  pagan  ideas  of  God  were 
gone;  rather  I  should  have  said  they  might 
have  gone.    For  our  Lord  in  His  wisdom 

75 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 

very  clearly  foresaw  that  a  large  part  of 
what  He  taught  was  out  of  the  mental  reach 
of  His  contemporaries.  Ages,  He  knew  and 
said,  would  have  to  pass  before  the  new 
heaven  and  new  earth  which  He  envisioned 
could  actually  come  into  being.  Ages  would 
have  to  pass  before  there  should  be  in  the 
world  that  intelligent  recognition  of  Him  and 
of  His  Gospel  which  He  figuratively  spoke  of 
as  His  Second  Coming.  His  predictions  were 
entirely  correct.  No  sooner  were  His  fol- 
lowers away  from  conscious  personal  rela- 
tionship with  Him  than  the  old  habits  of 
thought  with  which  they  had  been  brought 
up  began  to  reassert  themselves.  Christianity 
lost  something  of  its  distinctive  character  and 
began  to  be  more  or  less  Jewish.  And  then, 
as  the  new  religion  spread  to  other  nations, 
each  of  these  proceeded  to  graft  upon  it  part 
of  its  own  religious  inheritance.  Greece 
brought  the  dialectic  machinery  out  of  which 
Christian  philosophy  and  theology  were  built. 
76 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


Rome  made  the  Church  an  empire  and  a 
spiritual  autocracy.  Asia,  before  long,  added 
her  concept  of  asceticism  and  withdrawal 
from  the  world. 

So  the  old  pagan  idea  of  religion  as  an 
arbitrary  restraint,  a  tying  back,  became  a 
part  of  the  accepted  Christian  tradition.  By 
the  fifth  century  a.d.,  monasticism  had  be- 
come a  recognized  institution  of  the  Church 
—  was  even  thought  of  as  its  highest  em- 
bodiment. Simeon,  called  Stylites,  who  was 
seemingly  one  of  the  most  selfish  men  who 
ever  lived,  had  won  his  canonization  by  re- 
maining for  half  a  century  on  the  top  of  a 
pillar.  And  to  this  day  the  largest  nominally 
Christian  organization  holds  that  self-pun- 
ishment is  a  virtue,  and  that  the  highest  form 
of  religion  is  to  withdraw  from  contact  with 
the  world  and  even  from  its  most  sacred  and 
inspiring  ties.  Protestantism,  while  abjuring 
many  errors,  still  refused  to  accept  Christ's 
teaching  about  religion.    It  still  thought  of 

77 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


it  —  and,  in  large  measure,  thinks  of  it  to- 
day —  as  a  restraint,  a  curb,  a  tying  back  of 
the  spirit.  So  naturally  the  average  man 
today  thinks  of  the  Church  as  the  arch- 
enemy of  freedom  and  of  the  joy  of  living. 

Is  it  not  time  that  the  real  teaching  of 
Jesus  should  be  stripped  of  its  pagan  and 
oriental  accretions  and  be  seen  at  last  in 
its  true  light?  Is  it  not  time  that  there 
should  come  into  the  world  a  new  Chris- 
tianity —  new,  not  in  the  sense  of  deny- 
ing anything  that  was  genuine  in  the  old, 
but  as  a  fuller,  freer  and  more  spiritual  in- 
terpretation of  it?  The  new  Christianity  is 
here !  The  evidences  of  it  are  on  every  hand. 
Everywhere  men  are  turning  away  from 
the  contentions  of  priests  and  theologians  — 
turning  away  from  arbitrary  reasoning  about 
Christ  —  turning  back  to  the  personality  and 
teaching  of  Christ  Himself.  And  this  turn- 
ing—  this  realization  that  Christianity  is 
Christ  —  is  actually  that   mysterious  and 

78 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


long-awaited  Second  Coming  which  the 
Savior  prophesied  when  He  was  here  on 
earth. 

The  "New  Church"  exists  as  a  society  for 
the  promotion  of  the  new  Christianity.  It 
does  not  claim  to  have  a  monopoly  of  it;  it 
delights  to  recognize  it  in  all  churches  and 
in  all  lands;  all  that  it  asks  is  to  do  what  it 
can  to  serve  it.  And  yet  I  think  it  can  be 
fairly  shown  that  the  new  and  true  view  of 
Christ's  religious  teaching  was  first  set  forth 
among  men  by  Emanuel  Swedenborg.  This 
man  had,  it  is  true,  strange  psychic  ex- 
periences; he  claimed  to  reveal  to  men  from 
personal  experience  the  nature  of  the  life 
after  death ;  but  this  was  not  at  any  time  his 
chief  concern.  The  real  aim  toward  which 
his  life  and  all  his  efforts  were  directed  was 
to  set  before  men  a  new  and  higher  standard 
of  Christian  living —  as  he  called  it,  a  "true 
Christian  religion."  In  his  writings  we  find 
for  almost  the  first  time  since  the  Savior 
79 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 

walked  the  earth,  a  conception  of  religion 
which  is  radically  different  from  the  pagan 
one.  He  saw  religion  as  Christ  saw  it  — 
rather,  he  saw  Christ's  vision  of  religion  — 
not  as  a  matter  of  mere  theory  and  belief, 
not  even  primarily  as  a  matter  of  not  doing 
things,  but  as  a  matter  of  doing  things.  His 
most  fundamental  teaching  was  that  "all 
religion  is  a  matter  of  life,  and  the  life  of  re- 
ligion is  to  do  good." 

Searching  the  gospels  for  the  keynote  of 
Christian  living,  he  found  it,  as  the  world  in 
general  is  finding  it  today,  in  that  momentous 
saying,  "I  am  among  you  as  he  that  serveth." 
So  long  as  men  thought  of  themselves  as  iso- 
lated human  units,  it  was  possible  to  think  of 
religion  as  a  matter  between  each  man  and  his 
God.  But  if,  as  our  Lord  taught,  humanity 
is  a  spiritual  whole,  if  all  men  are  branches 
of  one  vine,  are  children  of  one  Heavenly 
Father,  a  new  factor  necessarily  enters  in. 
God's  chief  purpose  in  creation  is  not  the 
80 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


well-being  of  individuals  as  such,  but  that  of 
the  race.  And  so  the  only  true  way  to  serve 
God  is  to  do  what  we  can  to  carry  out  His 
purpose  —  that  is  to  say,  to  serve  mankind. 

This,  then,  is  the  essential  answer  to  the 
question,  "What  is  the  religious  life?"  It 
is  the  useful  life  —  the  life  of  service.  There 
are  few  thinking  men  or  women  who  would 
now  question  this  statement,  though  when 
Swedenborg  first  made  it,  something  like  a 
century  and  a  half  ago,  it  was  thought  revo- 
lutionary and  heretical  to  the  last  degree. 
And  even  now  it  needs  to  be  defined.  "Ser- 
vice" is  coming  to  be  more  or  less  a  catch- 
word, which  people  use  with  but  little  thought 
of  its  meaning.  Do  not  many  of  us  instinct- 
ively think  of  a  life  of  service  as  meaning 
a  life  in  some  way  exceptional  —  that  of  a 
minister,  perhaps,  or  of  a  physician,  or  a 
welfare  worker,  or  some  kind  of  a  public  ser- 
vant. These,  indeed,  may  be  useful  lives, 
each  in  its  own  way,  but  they  involve  only 
8i 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


a  small  part  of  the  sum  total  of  possible  ser- 
vice to  humanity. 

In  the  first  place,  only  a  few  of  us  are  fitted 
by  nature  and  disposition  for  this  kind  of 
occupations,  nor  would  the  world  be  better 
off  if  it  were  otherwise.  Let  us  admit  and 
emphasize  that  the  spiritual  element  in  man's 
life  is  the  supremely  important  factor  in  his 
existence.  If  this  is  neglected  or  abused,  all 
the  rest  counts  for  nothing.  On  the  other 
hand,  God,  in  His  infinite  wisdom,  has  put 
us  in  a  world  in  which  the  major  portion  of 
our  time  and  conscious  thought  must,  in  the 
nature  of  things,  be  devoted  to  material  con- 
siderations. Unless  most  people  gave  the 
larger  portion  of  their  energies  to  the  provi- 
sion of  food,  comfort  and  shelter,  there  would 
not  be  enough  of  these  things  to  go  around. 
Nor  is  it  difficult  to  see  why  it  is  well  that  this 
should  be  the  case.  The  cultivation  of  moral 
and  spiritual  virtues,  if  too  much  consciously 
indulged  in,  is  more  apt  to  lead  to  self-con- 
82 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


sciousness  and  self-conceit  than  to  a  true 
success.  Real  character  is  developed  mainly 
while  we  are  not  thinking  about  it.  And  for 
that  reason,  service  to  the  material  welfare 
of  our  neighbors  is  as  true  a  field  of  religion 
as  any  directly  spiritual  ministry.  God  has 
given  to  every  man  and  woman  a  unique  set 
of  abilities  and  powers.  There  is  one  thing 
which  each  of  us  can  do  well — if  not  better 
than  anyone  else,  at  least  much  better  than 
the  average.  It  may  be  ministering  directly 
to  the  souls'  welfare  of  our  neighbors;  it  may 
be  helping  to  train  their  minds;  it  may  be 
providing  food  or  clothing  or  shelter  for  their 
bodies;  or  it  may  even  be  providing  rest  and 
recreation  for  them  by  amusing  them.  What 
it  is,  matters  very  little;  the  main  thing  is  to 
find  it  out  and  do  it  to  the  best  of  our  ability. 
The  real  vehicle  of  a  man's  religion  is  his 
Job! 

There  are  some  interesting  corollaries  to 
this  idea.   For  instance,  the  so-called  "labor 

83 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


question"  is  now  an  important,  vivid  issue 
in  the  public  mind — and  certainly  I  have 
no  thought  of  even  trying  to  settle  it.  There 
is  a  feeling,  however,  which  seems  to  underlie 
£  good  deal  that  is  said  and  written  on  this 
subject,  which,  if  our  thought  is  true,  will 
make  a  right  solution  of  the  problem  un- 
attainable —  I  mean  the  feeling  that  work 
is  an  intrinsically  evil  or  unpleasant  thing. 
The  question  of  how  much  a  man  ought  to 
have  to  work  is  certainly  debatable,  and  many 
men  unquestionably  have  to  work  entirely 
too  hard.  The  pay  the  worker  should  receive 
and  the  conditions  under  which  he  should 
live  and  labor  offer  enormous  opportunities 
for  clearer,  fairer  thinking.  But  if  there 
is  anything  sure,  it  is  that  every  human 
being  ought  to  have  some  work  to  do,  and 
that  the  deliberate  idler  is  the  most  irreli- 
gious, as  he  is  the  most  useless  species  of  the 
genus  humanum.  There  are  but  two  sources 
of  lasting  human  happiness  —  work,  and  love 
84 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


—  and  the  man  or  woman  who  never  learns 
to  enjoy  working  at  something  he  can  do  well 
misses  one  of  the  highest  satisfactions  that 
this  life,  or  the  next,  affords. 

But  if  the  man  who  will  not  work  is  irreli- 
gious, so  is  the  man  who  works,  or  chooses 
his  occupation,  from  a  mere  motive  of  self- 
interest.  It  is  not  Christian  to  pick  out  an 
occupation  simply  for  the  money  one  can 
make  by  it,  and  there  are  at  least  some  nom- 
inally "respectable"  occupations  which  will 
be  abandoned  when  the  world  is  really  Chris- 
tianized. Nor  is  it  religious  to  work  at  a  use- 
ful occupation  simply  to  get  money  or  fame. 
These  are  poor  ends  at  best  —  bubbles  that 
break  as  we  touch  them.  Dead  Sea  apples 
that  turn  to  ashes  in  our  mouths.  There  is 
only  one  ambition  really  worthy  of  a  man 
made  in  God's  image,  and  that  is  to  leave 
the  world  a  little  better  for  his  having  lived 
in  it. 

The  useful  life,  however,  involves  more 
8S 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 

than  a  good  start  and  good  intentions.  It 
is  not  enough  that  we  just  find  a  job;  we 
must  proceed  to  make  ourselves  efficient  at 
performing  it.  Real  efiiciency  is  a  matter  of 
training  and  education,  but  still  more  of 
character.  And  it  is  here  that  we  trace  the 
connection  between  the  new  idea  of  religion 
and  the  old;  for  character  building  is,  in  the 
beginning,  a  matter  of  self-restraint,  of  giv- 
ing things  up.  It  is  a  different  kind  of  self- 
restraint,  however.  The  fact  that  a  thing  is 
pleasant  does  not  necessarily  put  it  under 
suspicion,  nor  is  it  ever  God's  reason  for  ask- 
ing us  to  abstain  from  it.  Evil  is  evil  be- 
cause it  hampers  our  usefulness,  and  in  so 
doing  robs  us  of  a  part  of  our  capacity  to  be 
as  happy  as  God  meant  we  should  be.  The 
new  Christianity  will  give  an  even  higher 
place  to  the  Ten  Commandments  than  did 
the  old,  because  it  will  more  clearly  recognize 
the  acts  which  they  forbid  as  anti-social,  and 
thus  dangerous  to  the  well-being,  alike  of 
86 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


society,  and  of  the  individual  as  a  member 
of  it.  If  a  man  ceases  to  be  a  useful  citizen 
when  he  lies  or  steals  or  commits  adultery, 
does  he  not  also  make  the  world  a  less  desir- 
able place  to  live  in,  even  for  himself?  Would 
not  a  country  in  which  the  Ten  Laws  were 
scrupulously  kept  by  all  the  citizens  be  the 
sort  of  country  in  which  each  of  us  would  like 
to  find  a  home? 

For,  as  our  Lord  taught,  the  Command- 
ments are  not  arbitrary  restrictions  placed 
upon  our  happiness;  they  are  the  very  laws 
of  our  own  nature.  He  said,  "The  Sabbath 
was  made  for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  Sab- 
bath," and  He  might  well  have  said  as  much 
of  every  Divine  law.  The  indulgences  which 
God  forbids  sometimes  appear  on  the  sur- 
face as  leading  to  happiness,  but  in  fact  they 
rob  us  of  the  chance  of  it.  Take,  for  example, 
the  promiscuous  indulgence  in  sex  relations. 
It  is  forbidden  because,  and  only  because,  it 
inevitably  tends  to  destroy  in  him  who  prac- 
87 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


tises  it  the  capacity  for  the  purest  happiness 
the  human  heart  can  feel  —  the  lasting  love 
of  one  man  and  one  woman.  And  so  it  is 
with  all  the  rest  of  God's  commands. 

Self-restraint,  however,  is  but  the  begin- 
ning of  the  religious  life.  This  is  a  positive 
and  not  a  negative  thing.  The  next  stage  is 
study  and  instruction.  It  is  strange  how  men 
will  recognize  that  it  takes  study  to  become 
a  good  carpenter  or  a  good  doctor,  and  yet 
feel  that  somehow  one  can  be  a  good  Chris- 
tian —  which  is  the  most  important  and  most 
difficult  thing  of  all  —  by  instinct.  The  life 
of  religion  is  to  do  good,  but  to  do  good  a  man 
must  first  know  how.  And  so  the  theoreti- 
cal side  of  religion  has  a  vital,  if  still  a  sub- 
ordinate, place.  Sources  of  religious  infor- 
mation are  many  and  various,  but  they  all 
come  back  to  the  one  Divine  fountain  of 
spiritual  truth,  the  Word  of  God.  The  man 
who  is  really  and  intelligently  religious  will 
read  the  Bible  regularly,  for  he  cannot  get 
88 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 

along  without  it.  Nor  will  he  be  satisfied 
with  the  mere  reading.  Knowing  that  other 
men  read  also,  he  will  want  to  confer  with 
them  in  order  to  get  their  interpretation  of 
what  he  reads.  He  will  want  to  get  the  in- 
terpretations of  men  trained  in  Bible  study 
as  an  occupation,  and  this  almost  inevitably 
will  lead  him  to  the  Church.  There  are, 
indeed,  many  religious  men  who  do  not  go 
to  church,  but  that  is  just  a  temporary  con- 
dition for  which  people  and  the  Church  are 
both  in  part  to  blame.  The  Church  will 
ultimately  awake  to  its  true  character  and 
mission,  and  religious  men  will  ultimately 
realize  their  need  of  it.  And  in  the  mean 
time,  if  the  Church  is  not  the  kind  of  thing 
we  think  it  should  be,  we  should  not  stand 
outside  and  criticize;  we  should  get  in  and 
help.  The  government  of  our  country  will 
not  be  substantially  improved  so  long  as  we 
persist  in  talking  and  thinking  of  it  in  the 
third  person.  It  is  not  "they";  it  is  we  — 
89 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


you,  I  and  our  neighbors.  And  the  Church 
is  just  the  same. 

Deeper,  however,  than  the  need  the  man 
who  tries  to  lead  a  useful  life  will  feel  of  in- 
struction and  of  the  Church — deeper  than 
any  other  need,  in  fact  —  will  be  his  need  of 
God.  One  cannot  serve  mankind  by  mere 
force  of  determination,  however  strongly  one 
may  wish  to  do  so.  There  are  too  many 
temptations  in  the  way,  and  we  ourselves 
are  much  too  weak,  too  lazy  and  too  self- 
indulgent.  More  and  more  the  thoughtful 
people  of  the  world — outside  the  churches 
just  as  much  as  in  them  —  are  beginning  to 
see  the  need  of  real  belief,  not  just  in  a  God, 
but  in  a  personal  God.  Such  a  book  as  Mr. 
Wells's  "God  the  Invisible  King"  could  not 
have  been  written  by  such  a  man  unless  the 
world  had  changed  from  what  it  used  to  be. 
We  need  not  only  to  believe  but  actually  to 
feel  that  in  our  efforts  at  well-doing  God  is 
with  us.  Lacking  this  inspiration,  the  very 
90 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE  ? 


stoutest  of  us  must  eventually  lose  heart. 
But  it  can  be  attained  —  in  many  ways,  but 
most  of  all  through  prayer.  This  is  no  theory, 
no  self-deception;  it  is  a  fact  of  human  ex- 
perience. The  whole  history  of  mankind 
shows  nothing  more  clearly  than  that  the 
right  kind  of  a  relation  with  God  can  give 
men  strength  to  do  what  they  would  other- 
wise have  been  incapable  of.  And  this  is 
most  true  of  all  when  God  is  recognized  for 
what  He  is,  the  infinitely  tender,  loving, 
approachable.  Divinely  Human  Being  who 
came  down  to  earth  and  lived  our  life  as  Je- 
sus Christ  our  Lord. 

What  is  the  religious  life?  It  is  a  life  of 
daily  service  to  men  lived  in  a  personal  re- 
lationship with  a  personal  God.  Such  a  life 
has  its  difficulties,  but  they  are  healthy  ones, 
and  its  rewards  are  above  all  computation. 
It  is  not  narrow,  but  broad;  not  gloomy, 
but  supremely  happy.  It  forbids  no  really 
good  thing,  even  in  this  world,  while  develop- 
91 


WHAT  IS  THE  RELIGIOUS  LIFE? 


ing,  as  they  can  be  developed  in  no  other  way, 
the  soul's  capacities  for  eternal  happiness  in 
that  life  for  which  our  brief  adventure  here 
is  but  a  training  and  a  preparation.  May 
God  grant  us,  every  one,  the  courage  and 
determination  to  set  out  on  it! 


93 


